I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking to people whose job it is to follow/report/blog about software. And more than one has told me that I once worked on a very original product that, despite my best efforts to explicate it, confused them. (Why they waited until now to tell me is fodder for another post. You’d think the more outspoken tastemakers would have been delighted to express their opinions at the time, not ex post facto.)

I love highly engineered products. I also love new ways of doing things. I believe software can and should make it possible for people to do new things, things they haven’t been able to do before. But it’s not that way in the real world.

There, people like incremental changes. They like the familiar (though that begs the question of how the conventional got that way). They want to “get it” right away. They want to be like everyone else (I can’t tell you the number of blonde housewives I see in white Land Rovers with Sudbury High School stickers on the car, typing away in traffic on their white iPhone 4Ss). They want to be conventional.

You’re thinking, “Uh…light dawns on Marblehead. That’s pretty obvious, ain’t it? And, Alex, who cares?”

It matters because many software types believe that to be successful, you need a completely new idea. You can’t fund a company to build a “slightly better” product. To get investor interest, you need to convince them that you can displace an incumbent in a very large category, preferably a category with sales in billions of dollars. But, in reality, I am coming to believe that that’s what the dumb money funds. It’s probably better to fund a replacement for something people already know and hate.

Consider these two (fictional) software products. Then tell me which one you’d spend money on. Be honest. Calculate how much one or the other would change your world, the way you work. Consider having to deal with all the people around you with whom you interact and what would be required to really change how they all work. Decide how much of your day you wish to devote to exploring something new, unknown, different.

Product A:

• Stretches your understanding of how you work
• Has the potential to revolutionize the way you collaborate with your colleagues
• Is less focused on user interface than on managing interaction

Product B:

• Is familiar
• Is an evolution of software you’ve used for decades
• Looks like your favorite website

Bottom line: successful software products today are like a Philip Glass symphony: modern, but repetitive.

Truly inventive software ends up being something only its creators can love — because users today don’t really want innovation. They want to think they’re daring, in the vanguard, forward-thinking…but, really, they don’t want to change a darn thing.

Well, I hit the jackpot this week. We were in Stockholm on December 6, 2011 to visit the Nobel Museum and its amazing Marie Curie exhibit. Behind the museum, I stumbled upon a mother lode of big, black BMW 750s with official decals and German (Munich) plates that were obviously being used to ferry Nobel  laureates to and fro in Stockholm. As you may know, the Nobel Prize ceremony is always on December 10 — the day Alfred Nobel died. So I imagine these limos were taking people to the ceremony prep. Imagine being a laureate and being treated to a tour of Stockholm in these babies! (And, with the prize money, being able to afford to buy one!)

Click on the play button to play the little slide show in your browser, or click on an image to open the slide show in Picasa  Web.

Now, a week after dinner with Judson and Dana followed by drinks two days later with Judson and Nick (along with Nick’s lovely wife and Judson’s protégé), what I have to say is simple: letting us drift apart was a colossal mistake. (And what a mitzvah Judson performed to come all the way here from LA to pull us together.)

I learned a couple of things being with my old pals. First, we really don’t change. Nick, Judson and Dana are exactly what they were when we were buds in school. The same reasons I loved them then apply — in full measure — today. Gesticulations, ways of talking, the looks in their eyes — all precisely as I remember them. And, today they’re more of what they were then. These three guys have done what they’ve done, succeeded where they were successful and taken arrows where they weren’t, all of which has made them intensely more of what they were in college. Cognac comes to mind: as it ages, goop in the barrel evaporates (which causes a fungus that lives on the evaporate to form on the cellar ceiling. What a life, eh?) but the stuff left behind gains flavor all out of proportion to the original taste.

Second, age brings both wisdom and dimmed memories. I had completely forgotten that Dana and I had been both sophomore and senior year roommates. None of us seem to be able to remember the fifth roommate (Nick thinks his name was Ben, but who knows?). But we still remember the Third Annual Irish-Polish Lobotomy Picnic (though there were never any other picnics, before or after), singing in the stairwells and very specific professors and classmates. Collectively, our memories form the best history of our individual lives then — a reason in itself to stay connected to each other now.

Third, it’s too damn easy to let friendships go. This may be my particular failing. Sure, I am busy with a career, two kids, life in the ‘burbs. I used to travel all the time on business. I was gasping just to keep up with my job and my family. It’s been a 30-year marathon I suspect my pals are running, too. But I never lifted a finger to find these dudes, with the exception of a call or two to Judson five or six years ago. After you let friendship drift away, you convince yourself it doesn’t matter and then you just forget about it. But that’s like propofol, the black hole of memory, making you feel better about forgetting something central.

So, guys, I wanna work on it. Nick, Tricia and I definitely are coming there for hot dogs. Dana, you gotta come by on your way to Sunderland. Judson, we will come see you in LA one day soon.

Count on it.

Click to enlarge

I’ve been working with a new startup for the last few months (which explains my silence here).

This company is crammed into a single office. There are usually three people working in the office…and when I’m there, I make four. I work from on a small “piece” of an Ikea desk, kindly lent to me by my colleague (who also snapped this photo of us working today).

And this is among the most exciting and satisfying work environments I’ve ever had. Stuff gets done in this environment. Consensus is reached quickly, often with simple nods and clipped phrases. There are no secrets, no politicking. Just amazing productivity.

And even when we’re getting on each others’ nerves, it’s productive. In such a confined space, you have to get past whatever pissed you off fast, because that’s the only way you can continue to be just feet from three other people.

And, as you might imagine, the proximity makes lighter moments even more humorous. Jokes ripple ’round the room, acquiring layer on layer of humor.

This can’t last, of course, even though personally, I am in favor of cramming the next three hires into the same office with the four of us. But for as long as it does last, it’s the most intensely creative and productive office environment I’ve ever worked in.

A Red Sox moment of agony

Do you know who this Red Sox first baseman is? Does this still image bring back unimaginable pain from the long lost 80s? Does Bill Buckner encapsulate for you the pre-21st century course for the Olde Towne Team?

What if you could laugh it off, courtesy of a brilliant crew of comedic writers and actors who combine this tragic tale with subplots of sexual performance anxiety, racial stereotypes and a (well-deserved) poke in the eye of psychiatry?

Well, that’s what’s happened in the most side-splitting 30 minutes of television ever produced. What deserves this Alex-is-now-a-TV-critic kudos? The “Mister Softee” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that first aired on Sunday, September 4, 2011 on HBO. (Here’s a series description and episode list.)

While CYE has made me laugh hard before, “The Bare Midriff” (season 7) attack on religious icons being one of my favorites, nothing compares to this new episode. I always suspected that the show was missing something.

Now I know what was missing: NYC, my birth-town until my adoption by Boston. Until this season, CYE was set in LA. But David and his regulars (especially the volume-goes-to-11 harpie Susie Greene) are funnier when roaming their ancestral home. These guys — and their humor — come from being New York Jews.

I’m sorry, but the LA lifestyle of fun and sun was always a mismatch, IMO, for the comedy. Even Leon, David’s fast-talking, foul-mouthed sidekick (“My johnson gets a little willie knowin’ you gonna git some tonight,” he says to David in “Mister Softee”) connects better in NYC than he did in LA episodes.

Somehow, bringing the cast to NYC has brought them home, reunited them with their tribal essence and sharpened their wit to its ultimate point.

If you can watch “Mister Softee” and not need an oxygen mask to replenish what you just lost laughing, there’s no help for you. Yup, as the girl in the ice cream truck tells a pre-pubescent Larry David, “Mister Softee” was “pretty, pretty, pretty good.”  I’ve given it the ultimate mark of respect — I set the DVR to not delete “Mister Softee” until I say so.

The view of the beach from our undisclosed location. If I tell you where this beach is, I'd have to kill you.

I’m on vacation on the Cape. We’re having a blast.

But this isn’t about the fact that we walked along the beach at dusk and had it all to ourselves or the fact that it’s so quiet and peaceful at our undisclosed location that I never want to leave.

Instead this post is about WordPress for Android, which allows me to blog directly from my G2.

I know that blogging is purportedly on the decline and that I should express myself in 140 characters or less.

Sorry, I prefer throw-back tech when it comes to online personal communication and with Swype, a camera and the WordPress for Android app, I have everything one needs to stay stuck in mid-decade.

OK, now that I’ve teed up a 50¢ word like “mendacity,” let me at least tell you what it means. Simply, someone is lying to you. And who hasn’t had the experience of being lied to persuasively?

Now, courtesy of researchers from Stanford and a story this morning on NPR that was so fascinating I almost ran into a tree, it seems that it’s possible just by listening to a CEO to tell when they are, uh, stretching the truth.

And while I knew what being mendacious meant, the story got me wondering how often I’ve been mislead by a CEO’s rosy outlook. Apparently, I — and many others — been suckered more than I ever thought possible.

I love to eat. I can’t cook. Even microwaved Velveeta on Ritz is well beyond my gastronomic capabilities. I am quite content to sit at home all day Sunday, watch football all day and consume embarrassingly large quantities of things the FDA has no labeling standards for.

Still, I have a lot of respect for “foodie” culture, which prizes organic, sustainable and locally-produced food. So, I am very pleased to recommend a new blog, http://www.seasonalfeast.com, written by my colleague, Sonal Rajan (get it…”See Sonal feast?”) which is off to a great start with mouth-watering new recipes for things I could only dream of being able to make.

So, Sonal, any time you wanna freeze some of that stuff for me for the next Patriots home game…

Dear Chairman Steele,

Last November, I made a $25 contribution to your party’s candidate. I also made a $25 contribution to the Obama campaign. Then, I wasn’t sure who would have been the better president.

Now, after months and months of non-stop invective from you and your party against President Obama, I am sure I did the right thing in voting for Obama.

Let me get something off my chest: when I gave you my contribution I asked you not to send me email…not to call me at home…not to keep sending me the vile propaganda and lies via snail mail that you are now sending at least twice a week. (We’ll get to the “survey” I’ve attached to this post in just a minute). I made the same request of the Obama campaign. They honored my request; you and your party of naysayers and obstructionists have not.

Instead, you keep sending me items like the “survey” I’ve scanned in and attached to this post. Maybe you thought that you could make wild claims like the one that the current administration is issuing “radical environmental regulations based on unproven theories and the demands of out of-touch left wing extremists.” Or maybe that some misguided Republicans might be pleased that your politicians “…have successfully blocked or amended many of their most radical proposals” while proposing and contributing nothing to the debate.

I get it…I really do. Negative works. Calling everyone names…calling their mothers nasty names…works better than actually governing…being a loyal opposition…contributing to the greater weal. Instead, for your party everything the other party does is wrong; only you can solve problems like Wall Street’s greed, a war based on lies and a sunken economy. Oh…I forgot. For those, we have Republicans to thank. As President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.”

I hope everyone reading this post takes a look at the “survey” you sent me. C’mon…do you think your voters are idiots? These questions are one-sided and are like waving the red flag at a bull. All you want is money…and if you piss people off at government…make them feel it’s working against them, so much the better for you and your power-hungry Senators (and so much the worst for us).

It’s too hard to pick the most egregious of the 19 questions on this “survey.” Clearly, you don’t give a damn about what people think…you just want them to read this, get angry and send you money. Still, what’s the point of a question like #16 (Are you in favor of the federal government taking a permanent ownership stake in the nation’s largest banks)? Aren’t Citibank and AIG dying to pay back TARP funds so they can get back to ripping off investors without government oversight? Didn’t the taxpayers line Goldman Sachs’s pockets with credit-default swap payments via AIG’s bailout? Isn’t it enough for you that Wall Street is too big to fail while the rest of us aren’t?

Seriously, Chairman Steele, if you want people to consider Republicans to be capable of running the country, start by working with the current administration to fix the problems we have. Next, admit to the failed policies of eight years of the Bush administration…including torture, warmongering and being asleep at the economic switch.

And please, please stop sending me twice-weekly appeals for money disguised as the worst kind of pandering direct mail.

Yup, I am back to some tried-and-true marketing tactics: poke the opponent in the eye using humor and rely on the power of community. What is new this time is how effective social media has been in helping create buzz about this stunt before we even pull it off.

If you are in SF next week, please do join us at the party. Remember to bring along photos and/or videos of the stunt for the competition.

Update October 21, 2009: It was a massive success. Check out the hi-jinks here

Well, this is one of those times when the government acts and you get to chose your reaction. On the one hand, the emergence of the ‘net as the definitive source of reviews for everything from software to celery has become a bonanza for the shills of the world who review products for filthy lucre and who pretend or obscure that they’ve been bought.

On the other hand, while advertising isn’t a protected form of free speech, it’s sad that we need government intervention limiting speech to prevent these people from preying on grandma’s Google search for cookie dough.

Into this fray steps the FTC with new rules to take effect in December, 2009. (I’ve attached a PDF of the new rules to this post for your convenience.)

You can see the rules struggling to keep up with new and social media. That, in itself, is an interesting commentary on how technological innovation always outstrips government’s ability to keep pace, much less anticipate the impact of technological change. Consider this heavily parsed defintiion from the rules:

An advertiser’s lack of control over the specific statement made via these new forms of consumer-generated media would not automatically disqualify that statement from being deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides….Thus, a consumer who purchases a product with his or her own money and praises it on a personal blog or on an electronic message board will not be deemed to be providing an endorsement.

In contrast, postings by a blogger who is paid to speak about an advertiser’s product will be covered by the Guides, regardless of whether the blogger is paid directly by the marketer itself or by a third party on behalf of the marketer.

…For example, a blogger could receive merchandise from a marketer with a request to review it, but with no compensation paid other than the value of the product itself. In this situation, whether or not any positive statement the blogger posts would be deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides would depend on, among other things, the value of that product, and on whether the blogger routinely receives such requests.

You all clear on that now?

Drivers on the Pike have long been deserving of the appellation “Masshole” — you can’t believe what I’ve seen people doing.

They eat, they sing, they use bedpans, they trim their nails…heck, they even paint their nails, they throw things at you, they drive winter “beatahs” so they can dare you to slam into them when they cut you off at 90MPH to get onto 128.

But nothing has scared me more in the last few years than watching Betty in her Hummer SUT and Bob in his Escalade texting. They text with one hand…they text with both hands. They take cell phone photos of themselves cutting people off, then they text the pix to family members with a “woot.”  They text while they are painting their nails.

Now, finally, there’s a YouTube video for them, that should be required viewing before being issued a Fast Lane transponder:

Well, I’ve just read a blog post from zug.com called “The Verizon Prank” in which John Hargrave risks big dogs and angry neighbors to make a point I wish more people were concerned about: lax privacy controls. Maybe we have the beginning of a new meme: Hargrave standing outside Verizon’s CEO’s home with the amp on 11 yelling, “Can you hear me NOW??”

My kids often ask why I object to signing pin pads at checkout lines. Simple, I tell them. Would you like to have your signature digitized and placed on orders for everything from stocks to cellphones? Wouldn’t care for that, they say.

But that fuzzy “privacy stuff” is protected, they protest. We live in public on Facebook and Twitter (and I don’t?)…we don’t worry about privacy.

The upbrading from my kids helps the confused cashier who thinks I am a nut and who can’t restart the transaction…yes, the pimply dude will say, your kid is right. Trust [TJMaxx, Wal-Mart, Exxon, Sears, L.L. Bean, the corner spa, the library] to protect your information. Like your lovely daughter there (lascivious glances at my tender young kids!), I trust [Gulf Oil, Toyota, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Charles Schwab, the IRS] with anything they want to store about me.

Not me. I remain very skeptical. And, after you finish laughing your ass off at this video, you should become more skeptical, too.

On the off-chance you haven’t heard about amazon.com erasing Orwell novels from Kindle users’ devices, here’s the coverage from nytimes.com.

You really have to congratulate amazon.com for creating new levels of nested metaphor. My Room 101 isn’t rats: it’s DRM.

Coffee lovers often talk about the “blend” — a mystical combination of the beans, the roasting and the infusion of hot water that delivers whatever it is coffee addicts see in their poison. (I just see mud.)

In high tech marketing, the “blend” is everything. You gotta have creativity… you gotta have authenticity…and given that small tech startups are either a) a completely new idea and/or b) trying to unseat titans, you gotta have balls to make your point. Big ones.

And my friends at currensee.com have ‘em. Watch this video. In just 1:02, you get it all in the blend. The beans (what currensee.com is), the roasting (it’s a social network for currency traders) and the infusion of…well…tush into the blend. If you don’t smile — and then head right over to the site — it’s definitely your problem.

My hat’s off to Dave and Michelle for ignoring all the reasons marketers come up with not to stand out and delivering their message (make more money trading money with a group) with a liberal dose of authenticity and humor.

Now…don’t spend too long replaying the end of this video, even if nobody’s watching you.

This is going to be a short and badly written blog post. It’s devoid of content. It has no theme. It really won’t make that much sense.

I’m trying to expunge a serious case of writer’s block by — what else — writing about it. And I’ve been cursed at the worst possible moment.

I need to write several press releases and can’t. I need to edit collateral. I can’t. I want to update several web pages. I’d better not. I composed a PowerPoint for an analyst this morning. It stinks.

A colleague I was talking with said I needed a “rest.” I’m not sure if she means I’m over the hill or tired. No matter. I’m not fit to write about it.

But at least I know what caused this blockage (if not how long it’ll last). I was searching for images today and came across the most revolting blog post of all time. If this doesn’t “stop you up” then nothing will.

This is post is for all my colleagues in the marketing biz. I want to tell you that we collectively destroyed email.

What did we do that was truly stupid?

Simple: we have so overdone email that now it’s useless for all of us. Have you noticed that no matter what you do — text or HTML, links at the top or bottom, a great discount offer or the promise of everlasting life — your response rates have gone down? Have you noticed that no matter what “marketing automation” system you track email with that since 2005 your response rates have declined from whole percentage points to basis points today? (A basis point is 1/100th of a percentage point. They’re used to track minute changes in bond rates.)

Marketing programs that decline this precipitously this quickly do so only because we have completely overwhelmed consumers and they can’t take it any more. They’re the ultimate marketing failure: one hand clapping in an empty auditorium.

We don’t seem to remember how resistant we all were at first. We didn’t believe you could sell lumps of coal via email blasts. “Our audience doesn’t have email…and won’t ever get email.” Remember that? But, of course, that 55-year-old CFO and that aircraft mechanic and that Mom at home with stinky diapers all got email. So, what did we do?

First, those of us in big companies spent too much on email (because you can’t help yourself and you were afraid of missing the boat), driving CPMs out of reach. Next, we “institutionalized” email…added people whose only job is to generate email blasts. We linked it to our CRM systems…we became “email experts.”

Because we’d spent real money on people and systems, we needed to measure what we were doing. So, of course, we needed “infrastructure” like Eloqua, Vertical Response and Constant Contact to manage it all. And the (physical) direct mail industry needed a place to go because we had previously crapped up direct mail, so guess where they went…with all their “direct marketing science” and purportedly effective techniques.

Having built a hugely expensive house of cards around email, we forgot one thing: anyone can send email because the Internet made it essentially free. While we were adding cost to email and being profligate to boot, the spammers discovered that basis points of response can impact US dollar flows into Nigeria. We encouraged the spammers, actually gave them the idea, while they laughed at us for “systematizing” it and making it a “core marketing practice.” Any fool can write a good email and find 10K people to send it to. Between us and the spammers, there’s not an iota of tolerance left in anyone for more email pitches.

Worse, the customer service people decided email — along with out-sourcing call centers to India — would be the ideal way to reduce costs (and, incidentally, ensure that artificial measurements of responsiveness replace actually talking to customers).

Now, we have all the people, tools and expense…and it’s all worthless. Pay-per-click and search-engine-optimization are now nearly ruined as marketing programs as well. (Is anyone paying less per conversion?) And that same weak, lemming-herding instinct is all over social media (which already has enough corporate Twitter feeds to tempt a new generation of spammers).

Creativity still counts. Someone will think of something clever soon…and then have to stand back and watch the masses of marketing experts foul it up as well.

My good friend Chris Williams, CEO of Vuuch, emailed me the other day and said that I really had to talk with Josh Mings of solidsmack.com. I just got off the phone with Josh, and I can say is, “Thanks, Chris, for connecting us up.”

See, Chris is a “true believer” in community — when he ran Seemage, we went to the community with a better idea about product documentation. And even though Seemage was a small little company with a big idea, the fact that we used community to start a discussion about those ideas simply blew competitors away. Right Hemisphere is still trying to figure out what happened to them, long after Seemage went onto greater glory in DS’s 3DVIA world. It was a complete demonstration of the power of community to give a good idea its due in the marketplace.

So, when Chris said Josh was doing some cool things on his blog, I took notice.

Lately, I’ve been worrying that the same thing is going to happen with the idea of community that happened with email, search and PPC: as less talented corporate marketing types get their hands on it, they’ll muck it up for the rest of us. If you think this hasn’t happened, take a look at your junk mail folder. It’s full of webinar invites three weeks in advance (because those idiots can’t get an email closer to the actual event) and Twitter feeds that read like data sheets.

But then, after a short conversation with Josh (who’s got a cold and still made time to talk with me), my confidence was restored. There will always be room for truly authentic voices and communities to coalesce around those voices. The ‘Net is big — and getting bigger — but great blogs like SolidSmack will still rise to the top of the heap.

That’s why I am so pumped that my buddy Chris and Josh have connected in the real world. Josh has reviewed Vuuch. Chris is talking with Josh to learn more about how to present another new idea to a new community…and these two guys really know how to put it together in a way that works for people…no crap…no slickness…just the real, authentic thing, amplified by the Internet’s ability to make time and distance disappear.

All right, so it’s been over a month since I last posted.

I’ve been busy at work and, well, I must say nothing has pissed me off enough to blog.

Still, I care about having a personal blog and keeping it active. The question then becomes: what to say when you are (temporarily) speechless. Writing blog posts takes practice. If you stop for too long, you lose it. I don’t wanna lose it. This blog is a useful way to keep the digital pencil sharp.

Then it struck me: write the kind of post people who really don’t have anything to say write as their best efforts. Just some blog drivel. The internal dialog began:

“Ah, ha! So nothing you’ve ever written on your blog has been dull, witless or banal, eh?”

“I didn’t mean that…how arrogant do you think I am? I just meant that it would be OK for once to write about something nobody could possibly give a shit about just to keep the blog alive and keep the blogging juices flowing.”

“Sure…what you really mean is what you label ‘ordinary’ is what you secretly hope readers of the blog will find humorous, or at least interesting. It’s a head-fake, ain’t it?

“Well, there was once this sitcom that was ostensibly about nothing in particular…”

“And you want to write the blog post equivalent, eh? All under the guise of ‘nothing to say’.”

“You betcha. Wait until all those comments come flowing in…you’ll see.”

So after all that…this blog post is about the fact that I’ve resumed drinking soda after swearing off it since January, 2007. I had a can of the elixir of modern life: Diet Dr. Pepper with my birthday cake yesterday.

Aren’t you thrilled for me? Stay tuned for the blog post wherein I describe what it’s like to drive a BMW M3.

Maybe it’s your health care insurer manipulating your out-of-network health care claim reimbursements to increase their profits.

Remember last fall when you signed up for the significantly more expensive plan that lets you choose a doctor out-of-network? You thought you were being smart.

Instead, it turns out you’re being screwed. Your extra premiums are finding their way into the pockets of the same insurer who buys TV ads with happy, young, healthy mothers and fathers in the park playing Upsie with their cute, giggling babies. Not a care in the world, presumably, because they’re covered…but it’s really a picture of ignorant bliss because when that baby needs a specialist, that couple’ll have to sell the Chevy and walk to appointments to pay the doctor’s bill.

Check out this report from the New York State Attorney General on how insurance companies are screwing their policyholders on out-of-network reimbursements. It’ll make you sick (just be damn sure you don’t go out-of-network to see a doctor).

For me, this is just another example of the unrestricted greed that nearly 30 years of Reaganism (“government is bad…unrestricted markets are good”) has generated and the incalculable damage it has done to our society. If a business can figure out a way to screw you — and better yet, legally do it in the dark like United Healthcare did with the cost database it uses to reimburse policyholders — well, that’s just normal, right?

Everywhere you look, we’ve been  cheated. Big Business is totally out-of-control. The financial system has collapsed — and taken our security with it. Even our ideals were trashed mercilessly by a government that lied to us all.

But, oh boy, watch out. This country has had mega-pendulum-political-swings in the past (the Progressive Era, the New Deal). If there are more people out there who think like me (and you bet there are), politicians had better get the message and get some stuff done (health care, re-regulation of the business and financial worlds, a sane foreign policy). And they better get it done now.

I was channel surfing recently (no mean feat on a Verizon FIOS system), and paused briefly on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. I was instantly riveted…but not because of what the show is ostensibly about.

Briefly, it’s a cinema verité recounting of the struggle between environmental radicals and the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The self-styled “sea shepherds” aren’t letter-writing activists. They’re true amateur anarchists who favor “direct action,” placing themselves in danger to save whales from the Japanese whom they believe are illegally killing whales.

For their part, the Japanese are clearly hiding behind a combination of doubleplusgood international agreements (which allow a limited catch of whales for “research”) and lax enforcement of environmental policies by other governments. At $1M per whale and a permitted catch in the thousands, this is a big business and the research claim is patently bogus.

It makes for a great plot for a reality show. But while all the critical reviews of the show have focused on the action, the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in this struggle (the producers clearly favor the environmentalists) is less gripping for me than watching a cult leader in action.

The real centerpiece of the show is Captain Paul Watson (always referred to as “Captain”). This is a man who has pissed off his home country of Canada and lead them to criticize him individually like nobody I’ve ever seen (here and here). Imagine a national government calling you out like this! He co-founded Greenpeace (something he writes extensively about with apparent pride), yet was drummed out for being, apparently, uncontrollable.

But the real drama in Whale Wars — and something I think was unintentionally documented in the video — is how Watson creates, develops and promotes his cult of direct action. In short, we’re watching a Jim Jones or maybe a Hitler at work.

Watson clearly uses people as grist for his “mission.” A cook damages a propeller on the helicopter. Watson then publicly asks him to illegally board one of the Japanese vessels to “make up for the helicopter.” After 36 hours being held as a prisoner on the Japanese boat, the cook is returned to the welcome of the entire crew. The camera catches Watson at the moment the cook is back on board saying that he won’t go down on deck to welcome the cook back…instead one of the staff “priests” Watson has on board should bring the poor Aussie up to see him on the bridge. Upon being lead to see Watson, the cook is immediately placed on sat phone with the media in order to extract maximum press value from the incident. Not once do we hear Watson commend the cook for his foolish bravery.

To up the ante, later Watson proposes an all-female team to board a Japanese vessel. This goes awry, and in the process one woman shatters her pelvis. Ladies, how’d you like to have a shattered pelvis on a boat in Antarctica weeks from port with your only company being zealots on a mission? Not once do we see Watson demonstrating any concern for the woman. Only for the “mission.” We do, however, see him pissed off at the amateurs’ ineptness in carrying out his plans.

Watson, in true cult style, is also isolated from the volunteer crew — the raw meat — by a layer of officers on the boat who transmit both his orders and his message. They reveal themselves to be sycophants of the worst type, and when the original doctor on board raises questions about the dangers of boarding parties, he is quickly purged for a more pliant medic.

Are you fascinated yet? I am telling you, this TV show isn’t about whales. It’s Introduction to the Psychology of Cults 101. It demonstrates how in the crucible of a complex environmental issue a charismatic leader can, using classic techniques of isolation (what’s more isolated than a boat at sea for three months?) shape, implore, shame and motivate people into doing his bidding. Chat ‘em up, get ‘em to do what you want, no matter how dangerous, call the press, dock the boat, send ‘em home and do it again next year.

For me, the proof of all this is on the Sea Shepherd website. I noticed that on the show every time Watson was shown in his cabin, he was on a computer. After reading the website, I am convinced that he’s writing and posting much of the news on the site himself. And the site is really a paean to Watson, penned by Watson, who always refers to himself in the third person.

I am reading Ian Kershaw’s massive Hitler: A Biography, in which Kershaw documents exactly how Hitler — unable to have normal relationships with anyone save his mother — uses people in the most expedient, opportunistic way possible to achieve his ideological objectives. And, on a much smaller scale (but maybe just as dangerously?), that’s how Watson uses the people on his boat.

I’ve never seen a more fascinating television show…it isn’t about whales at all. It’s about a whale of a demagogue.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I turn over my blog, temporarily, to my daughter Rebecca so she can publish her humorous poem, The Germ Soldier. If you’ve ever seen a middle-schooler with a runny nose, you’ll relate to her art.

The Germ Soldier
By Becca Neihaus

They spread like throwing sand,
Since little boys don’t wash their hands.

They are invisible by my eye,
Some say they might be shy,
Though that’s a lie.

Armed with Purell I stand,
Ready to attack and distinguish germs where they land.

Desks and tables covered like bees in a hive,
When I am done, they will not be alive.
Thoroughly I spray,
To make all germs fade gray.

Once they disappear,
All is clear.

A passion for stopping germs,
Is never done out of term.
I do it everyday,
Making sure they all go away.

Really quickly:

• I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey
• I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities. I heard Matt on the WordPress podcast just brush the whole thing off — these are developers with their heads in the wrong place.
• I’m writing this with Zoundry Raven — a Windows Live Writer competitor (if free software can be competitive in the real sense of that word). We’ll see. Setting up FTP for the images was, as always, the “trick.” But I am not so sure the UI is all that much difference from the WP editor. Lots of unlabeled icons in the toolbar that look just like the WP icons (a good thing since once you know one you know them all), but overall I am not sure what it adds to the mix — other than the ability to run off a thumb drive. That might be nice if you want to blog from, say, one of those open-sewer computers they offer at public libraries.
• Chris is makin’ might good progress over at his blog, but discovering it’s a lot of work.

This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list the ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ‘em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor?

1. Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese
2. Durian is the world’s stinkiest fruit
3. Both smell like shit
4. I need to demonstrate what trackbacks are to a friend
5. If you are a big, French software company, stop trying to pretend you understand social media

OK, now back to the post.

One of my colleagues is trying his hand at blogging. He’s also trying to harness the power of social media in the PLM (product line management) space. His blog is sort of a stealth thing, to see what the community thinks of his plan. In a recent post, (metaphor #4) he takes Dassault Systèmes to task for launching a blog with a license agreement — and credits me for encouraging them to blog. Chris also says that www.3dvia.com is “up and running” — though it looks like the same useless, ham-handed attempt at community it was in late 2007 (#5).

But the DS blog (#4 again) is, ahem, a stinker (metaphors #1 or #2, depending on your cultural linage, combined with #3.)

It’s the “standard” corporate blog (#5) — saying nothing, written by professional writers, devoid of personality, expectorating corporate propaganda without a point of view, destined for the dust-bin of the blogosphere….except that DS will assign 30 people to it and it will still be smelling like [pick one: durian or Vieux Boulogne] in five years (#1, #,2 and #3 — a trifecta — or for you, Chris, a hat trick).

I suspect that they got together in a big all-day meeting in Suresnes and decided that after www.3dmojo.com (#4 again, plus a little #5) , they needed a “real” blog. The Internet and PR people probably liked the idea; the brands probably said nothing in the room, while heaping derision on it among themselves.

What DS got on their blog is plenty of smell…and very little else.

This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking.

It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking than Gartner, I haven’t found it. I wouldn’t be surprised if their analysts talking about social networking and social networking companies were last working on an update to the wave on MVS/TSO, the “social network” for mainframe COBOL programmers.

Gartner talking about social media is like me going to a 20-sumthin’ nightclub in a Speedo. (I’m middle-aged and need to lose a few pounds…so there’s your image.)

They have nothing to contribute — except to the social media software vendors who wait in vain for Garnter to bless them and their space (all the while charging them outrageous fees for “access” and conferences in which Gartner pontificates to the 50 sleepy clients they’ve attracted for a junket).

I can’t claim to be on top of every social media happening out there. But I can assure you that whatever self-possessed, supercilious prognostication that Gartner social media analysts make (.9 probability) will impress only their very-late-adopter client community who themselves will never, ever really get it.

I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970′s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the audience, it was more an attempt to fulfill a personal obsession. 

Newman is a musical genius the world seems to remember only for Short People, a song so unrepresentative of Newman’s work that its enduring popularity must be an unending annoyance for him. (Just today, the guys in the office were talking about loading up iPods…they talked about Led Zeppelin, Heart and Eric Clapton. Short People came up, too. What a shame.)

Anyway, Newman records albums so infrequently that it’s a major event in my life when a new one is released. If Newman is pissed off that the current justices on Supreme Court will outlive him (as he sings in the blistering A Few Words in Defense of Our Country), I am none too happy with Newman himself for not trying harder to satiate the few fans he has. He claims in a video documentary that he has 80,000 fans — down from 200,000 — and none of us are attractive looking.

I remain awestruck by Newman’s early work, especially 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys. The recordings from the 80s and 90s, topped off by Bad Love didn’t seem as sharp or as even to me as the early albums. Now, the question I am thinking about is whether the new album finds Newman back in form. The short answer is, I don’t yet know.

But there’s no rush. Given that we might have as long as a decade to evaluate it, what’s the hurry? I mean, I’d love to have more Newman music to consider, so Randy, how about a new album in two or three years? After all, you said on your website that this only took eight to 10 weeks to write and another eight to 10 to record.

So, it’s not me I am worried about. It’s the rest of you who didn’t find Newman in your formative years. You guys, in your 30s and 40s, you’ve got several decades of savoring this music to catch up on. Unless you get started right away — savoring an album a decade — you’ll never get to Harps and Angels.

I’m more worried about your inability to catch up with the rest of us than about the fact that I’ll probably be dead before the next Newman album.

Last weekend, I attended PodCamp Boston. It was incredible. And there are two things I learned. First, my fellow vps of marketing in Boston, who at their networking event three days before Podcamp Boston indicated they’d never heard of this major event happening in their backyard, will remain with their heads totally stuck in the sand.

Second, even I haven’t gone all the way. This blog’s URL was www.alexneihaus.com, representing my old-style Internet persona.

Now, as the more observant of you will notice, we are at www.yobyot.com. (Toyboy spelled backwards.)

What’s the difference? At PodCamp, people signed their badges with their Twitter handles. I’d been dabbling in Twitter — not quite getting it — until PodCamp, when I met people who tweeted they’d met me while we were talking. The number of people I follow and those following me exploded (relatively…I am still building contacts there).

So, the only right thing to do is to lose the web 1.0 persona and become all I can be.

@I @am @now @yobyot

This is a post about product liability. Or, more accurately my fury at Whirlpool for making it nearly impossible to lift their refrigerators without slicing off your fingers.

Short version: we’re renovating the kitchen. Today, stainless steel appliances are all the rage. This despite the fact that they collect fingerprints, dent easily and cost more. Still, we do what we’re told by the kitchenistas and we dutifully bought a stainless steel fridge.

Through a series of mishaps, it turned out that the general contractor, the tile guy and I ended up having to lift this 600 pound beast up the three stairs to my front door and then into the kitchen to install it.

I was on the left side of this thing, trying to lift it up on the count of three. “One….two…three!” Bob shouted and we all heaved up and towards the door. I had my shoulder against the bottom and my left hand under the left side.

On step two, I looked down and was gushing blood. The damn stainless steel cabinet’s un-smoothed-off bottom edge had sliced deeply into three fingers of my left hand. It was painless (then) and so I was sorta detached from all the blood literally pouring from my left hand. (I am left handed by the way).

We finally got the behemoth into place, and as I was taking off the last of the shipping material, I considered whether or not to tilt the monster back and wipe the blood off the bottom edge that had so nearly severed my fingers. “Nah,” I thought. “Let the next owner mix his or her DNA with mine.” (Don’t anyone tell Tricia I left a souvenir on her now stained stainless steel cabinet. This is our secret.)

Today, as I sit at work and try my level best to type emails and collateral, I’ve considered calling a torts attorney (aka an ambulance chaser) and suing Whirlpool. It’s idle, but appealing, thinking (the cuts will heal). But one or two more steps, and I think the first use of the fridge would have been to chill my severed digits in preparation for surgical reattachment.

Had that happened, I’d have had a whole new career: torturing Whirlpool through the court system.

Let me say right off the bat that I know that I really should get over it. I should stop being so competitive that I am willing to blast former business competitors for things that no longer matter to me (or the descendants of the original competition).

But I can’t help it. It’s just part of me. I still like to throw an occasional lighted one at Microsoft (I’m still brooding over the 1990′s battle between Notes and Exchange) or Autodesk (we got a blessed divorce in 2002).

Today, it’s Right Hemisphere’s turn. These are the guys who took government money from New Zealand, then took money from SAP, undoubtedly turning their cap table into a cross between the Auckland and Walldorf phone books, then called themselves a startup and hired a marketing team whose first apparent deliverable to the marketplace in 2007 was an 18-page glossy brochure. (Now, I know some people love brochures, but they are both expensive and passe. Ask RH how many of those are sitting in boxes collecting dust in the marketing group’s area at HQ.)

When I was with Seemage, we never really considered RH much of a competitor, what with their message being….well, what exactly was their message? Can’t seem to remember it. Think it had something to do with Adobe, then SAP, then servers all over the place. OTOH, at Seemage it was simple: we were about CAD reuse on the desktop without the heavy costs of PLM.

OK, so what’s the proximate cause of this screed? After all, Seemage is gone…and I’m no longer consulting for Dassault. In a word, it’s RH’s new “blog.” After a couple of years, it looks like RH finally wants to try to grasp the power of community….by copying the old Seemage formula of an in-your-face blog.

At Seemage we had 3dmojo.com. And for a while, it was all we had. But we poured our hearts out. And it was an incredibly effective way for a great product (and a pretty damn good company, IMHO) to get noticed. No fancy stuff…just a direct conversation with the 3D CAD community, who listened intently (and who still do).

We said what we meant and we weren’t afraid to say practically anything (a representative sample is here), as long as we passionately believed in it. A sales rep crashed a competitive trade show using an iPod to show what was then called Seemage (now 3DVIA Composer). It was such a success that we started a podcast that goes on today. Traffic built because we had something to say that was intelligible and cogent.

So, now imagine you are RH. You’ve got questions: your brochure is gathering dust…people come to the seminars at the Capital Grille for the steak, not the software…and little ole Seemage went on to greater glory inside DS. What was the magic about them? Ah ha! It had to be their blog. Gotta git me one of them! Voila: deep3d.com.

A more banal corporate blog I don’t think I’ve ever seen. They have nothing to say. Rehashes of trade shows from the vp of marketing. An SE kowtowing to Adobe Flex (big surprise there). The CEO reprising their SAP deals. (I’m beginning to feel the warm excitement of SAP as a new target…check out the stunt we pulled at SAPPHIRE.)

In short, the reason people who are imitated don’t usually feel flattered by the imitator is that, by definition, imitations lack inspiration. Go ahead, RH: paint a happy face on your toy blog. The only thing apt about it is that the name is somewhat onomatopoeic: this blog is going deep6d very quickly.

OK, so this isn’t going to be the most scintillating post I’ve written. Even I — (in)famous for the bitchin’, blastin’ blog post — need a little banality break now and then.

The motivation to blog this morning is that I’ve written this post and uploaded it from an Acela train stopped in New Haven on the way to a business meeting in NYC. I’ve got my ThinkPad plugged in and my Internet connection going over an incredibly slow (but serviceable) T-Mobile Internet sharing connection on my cell phone. (Why it’s taken T-Mobile until now to launch 3G is beyond me. And the 3G network they are launching uses trash spectrum nobody else in the world is using.)

Back to the post…I remember when a stop in New Haven on a Northeast Corridor train necessitated a switch from electricity to diesel. I remember when you couldn’t hold a cup of coffee on the train because the rails didn’t understand parallel. I also remember when “on time arrival” meant “sometime on the scheduled day.” And, the general condition of the car I am sitting in isn’t terrible, as far as public accommodations in the US go. So things are improved. And the Acela, for all its problems, really does beat an airplane ride for a Midtown meeting.

But does this train — after all the investment and tax money — compare to the Shinkansen or the Inter-City Express or even the TGV? In a word, nope. No matter how much train buffs (a subculture I brushed up against when I was technology manager for the now-defunct Boston & Maine RR) wish it could be, this train isn’t even close. The cars are a little too run down. The service is a little too infrequent (why not Acela trains every 30 minutes in the morning and evening?).

But the major problem? It’s a number: 3:16. That’s the published time from Route 128 to Penn Station. Even the Big Dig has been completed (at an astonishing cost and loss of life). But Amtrak’s promise of a 2:30 trip from Boston to New York hasn’t been realized…and I doubt it ever will.

It’s a metaphor for the decline of American technology and capability. If ever there was a train route in the continental US that could support high-speed traffic, this is it. What a shame.

After Revit was purchased by Autodesk in 2002, I spent a grand total of a few months there. I’ve not written much publicly about my experiences there because they have a reputation for long institutional memories. I am sure that this post isn’t going to make them love me any more than they already don’t.

Before Autodesk bought Revit, I always wondered about the apparent favorable bias among the CAD press towards them. In my time in the industry, they were pushing their boots into customers’ and partners’ heads (something I suspect they’re still pretty good at) but portions of the CAD press always seemed to give them a bye. Truth be told, there were some CAD journalists who hated them unreasonably, but by and large, they got a pass.

Still, the “professional” CAD press was careful to hide it. Very careful. But it was there. In an incident that blew up on Autodesk, a letter that Revit sent to ADT consultants ended up in the hands of a journalist who told me Autodesk’s PR department had faxed it to him. They were simply reprinting whatever they were sent by Autodesk.

But now, and for the first time, we got ‘em. Dead to rights. Check out this quote from Deelip Mendez, one of the arrivistes in the CAD press, a blogger who would have little traffic if not for the fact that Ralph and Roopinder have been promoting his blog:

But I know that Autodesk Marketing is the best there is and when they say something, I listen and wonder.

This comes in a long, unfocused post in which Deelip tries hard to make something out of nothing between Dassault and SolidWorks. But there it is: the slavish, unthinking bias that Autodesk is…wait for it…a thought leader. And that that leadership comes from…squeeze your eyes shut in case you are blinded by the revelation…the marketing department.

In being so overt, Deelip has blown everyone’s cover, the thin veneer of independence that has been carefully nurtured for a long time. The CAD world is a small place…there’re only so many vendors to bill. Between dissing startups as irrelevant (they said that about both Revit and Seemage) and kowtowing to ADSK’s marketing department, it must get monotonous drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid all the time.

 

At work, we use Clicky web analytics to supplement our web statistics. It’s a great service, and Sean at Clicky has always answered my questions quickly and personally. In short, they’re exactly the kind of people you want to work with.

So, I can imagine how furious he must have been when he had to deal with Linksys "technical" support on a blown switch.

You can read the story here, but the real point is that Sean got smart: he used his blog and his knowledge of SEO to make damn sure Linksys will pay and pay. Just check out the searches Sean posts. If I were looking for a switch, I’d search for exactly these terms and walk, no make that run, away from this particular switch.

The moral: not only is blogging the ultimate version of Consumer Reports (minus the holier-than-thou-1930′s Socialist slant), but the sweet, sweet satisfaction of really stickin’ it to mega-roadblocks like Linksys delivers catharsis and helps others.

Right on, Sean. And thanks for the warning, though I wish you had some Netgear stuff to trash. I want them to suffer, too, but my blog isn’t as well trafficked.

In one of the worst examples of misandry posing as journalism I’ve read in many, many moons, Lori Gottleib writes in The Atlantic that women should just “settle” for men they don’t necessarily love in order to get married.

Guys, you gotta read this article. Initially, you get the feeling that you are being given a peek inside the most mysterious organ on the planet: the romantic pathways of an American woman’s brain. Gottleib writes in a “let’s just dish” style that I imagine will resonate with women. That tone lets you feel like you are about to be enlightened about what’s really going on inside as women deal with the tough balances of marriage, family and work. You keep hoping that Gottleib will recognize the real value of marriage: the roles fathers can play in their children’s lives.

But it’s not to be. Turns out this all about Gottleib. Her penis-and-a-paycheck feminism turns out to be simple narcissism and personal regret at single motherhood posing as “don’t make the mistake I made” pseudo-advice. Check this out:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.

Uh, “infrastructure??” Is that some kind of new term for a human male?

Using that all-important cultural touchstone, the sitcom, as a reference point, Gottleib declares, “So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long-married couples are having much sex anyway?” Uh, sorry, Lori. If you knew much about men, this wouldn’t be a question.

Gottleib goes on and on and on and on about…herself. Her son, someone that should’ve figured prominently in the logic for settling, gets short shrift:

Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”

It’s all so disingenuous. At the end of the day, this article devalues men and objectifies them in ways no male writer could ever hope to get away with when discussing women. It’s a damn shame The Atlantic is so important a magazine. Someone might actually believe this tripe.

I’ve been busy working on my third totally new web site in less than a year — and that doesn’t count the sites I simply helped update.

The one thing I’ve learned: no matter what technology you use, whether you use a CMS or you code the thing by hand, it’s an astonishingly complex and costly thing to create a commercial web site.

Everything — and I mean everything — is like riding on blocks. If your site looks good in Internet Explorer, it doesn’t in Firefox. If you try to avoid JavaScript, you can’t do squat for the user. The best-intentioned UI conventions become mush as you shoe-horn the content into them. Just proofreading the site requires the patience of Job and the skill of a novelist.

Worse, you can’t please everyone. So knowing how to please most people becomes the standard, and figuring that out before you have weeks of analytics to look at is more black art than science.

I think the solution is radical simplification. Set an arbitrary limit on the number of pages. 10, 15, whatever. Make the content fit the bucket you’ve created. Use a blog (how’d you guess we’d come back to that?) for everything else. People want fresh…a blog is fresh. You want to change your message on a dime, focus visitors’ attention on something? A blog does it.

Doing a standard corporate web site is like being run over by square wheels. The only thing that’ll round those wheels off is a complete departure from what corporate web sites have become.  And even I am not crazy enough to try that yet.

So, crush me with those edges…

Well, check out this case study.

On Saturday, I blasted TIAA-CREF. Today, they’re all over this blog. And I’ve got the stats to prove it.

Here’s a a screen grab of activity from today (Monday, 2/4) from Clicky.  Almost an hour from a single IP address! (This may represent several users as I presume TIAA-CREF has routers and firewalls that share their public IPs.) And, there are multiple visits from multiple TIAA-CREF IPs that add up to more 90 minutes of time on this blog. That’s a long time for visitors to spend on a blog, even in aggregate.

Wonder who is at this IP address?

 

Yup, it’s proof positive of the power of blogging. Was it more forceful to blog about the Orwellian language in the price increase letter or should I have talked to a customer service representative by phone? Which do you think got more attention?

I hate obfuscation. This week, TIAA-CREF sent my wife the letter I’ve attached to this post as a PDF. It’s unsigned, unaddressed and clearly written by an attorney…but the marketing guys got into the act as well.

The letter is a notice of a price increase….but it never says TIAA-CREF is raising prices. It only says that “estimated expenses will increase by eight to ten basis points.”

Check out this copy:

The revised estimated expenses also reflect costs unanticipated at the time of the original estimate in the prospectuses, including expenses associated with operating two platforms to serve institutional retirement plans pending completion of plan conversions to the new platform and costs associated with processing delays and delays in realizing anticipated savings.

In other words, we have to raise prices because we have duplicate computer systems, neither of which serve you, the individual investor. We screwed up merging them, and not only didn’t we save the money we thought we would, we have to spend more. You get to pay for it. 

OK, I get it. This wealthy company, ostensibly dedicated to teachers, professors, nurses and other non-profit employees and hiding behind noble ideas like serving the ”greater good” and leveraging “the power of .org,” can’t simply say “we’re raising prices.”

Instead we get a long, apologetic argument about better service to “institutional clients,” (sales) visits to campuses, and a quote from Forbes backing up that when you call these people, they’re happy to sell you more overpriced investments. We also get some nice footnotes where the name should be of a human being taking responsibility for the price increase.

(I didn’t attach the expense ratios, but ranging from .48% to .905%, I hope many of the company’s customers will realize that there are far less expensive options available.)

A song that’s in high rotation on my iPod these days is the lovely duet Please Read the Letter from the unlikely pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (yes, I know: heavy metal and bluegrass…who’d have thunk it? Go ahead and blow 89 cents on the song. You’ll love it).

TIAA-CREF’s marketing and legal people should listen carefully to some of the song’s lyrics:

…A fool could read the signs
Maybe baby
You’d better check between the lines
Please read the letter,
I wrote it in my sleep
With help and consultation from
The angels of the deep…

After over a year of consulting, I’ve taken on a new role with Active Endpoints which returns me to my roots in application development. For many years before I went into marketing, I developed applications using what was then considered leading-edge technology.

What amazes me is that leading-edge developers today face the same problems as I did then: there’s too much “stuff” to conquer, too many technologies to integrate and too many piece parts to put together with duct tape.

Active Endpoints has created a new category of app dev software, what we call a visual orchestration system, or VOS. You can read more about it in a press release we issued today…there’s a lot more to come from us on this topic. (Those of you who know me aren’t surprised to hear that, I would assume.)

Anyway, I think this company can change — indeed revolutionize — the way applications are developed by helping the industry think large — as in programming in the large. This is in complete contrast to the way people think today, which is all about devolving problems to their smallest units to make them solvable, then trying after the fact to put them together in some coherent way. Any of you who have ever tried to build something from a kit knows how impossible this can be.

Given the size of the problem and the amazing technology Active Endpoints offers, once I got the chance to join I found it irresistible.

I am very late to the Chocolate Rain phenomenon. In case you are one of the remaining 50 people who don’t know about Tay Zonday’s famous (>13M views!) music video, I’ve embedded the YouTube video below. Be sure you also watch the related videos, including the Chad Vader spoof and Tay’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Back the to main purpose of this post: it’s time to bash the purported “weight loss” drug Alli again. Last summer, I both railed against and sympathized with the marketers of this “miracle drug.” I empathized with the plight of marketers who have to market a drug that, uh, “soils” your clothes with….here it comes…an ugly chocolate rain as it works. Then, I whined about those same marketers minimizing these effects on people.

Then, last week, I was in a Wal-Mart and was stopped dead in my tracks by the display captured in the cell phone photo above. Look at the bottom of the retail display. It says, “can you commit to this?” Cleanly designed and mostly white brochures that match the nice white packaging of the “starter kit” of Alli on the display explain that low-fat foods reduce, the…yes, I am going to say it again…”chocolate rain effects.”

The pun on commitment to achieving a diet goal strikes me as the most cynical marketing I’ve ever seen. It’s not about commitment to low-fat diets…it’s about commitment to a drug that makes you produce a nasty chocolate drizzle. After all, if you can commit to a low-fat diet, what the heck do you need Alli for?

And, yes, I find the minimalist, white graphic design of the packaging and the brochures offensive as well. This product, which in truth, makes you slightly ill by interfering with your ability to absorb fat, should be in a black box with big FDA warnings, or at least a very dark brown that matches the real value of Alli itself.

I wanted to make sure that readers of this blog check out an exciting new voice. My pals at Enigma have started blogging, and I think that their first post (at least the first post I didn’t write) is pretty compelling.

Clearly, I am involved in setting up their blogging efforts, but today when Joy and I were working on her post, I can tell you, I just sat back and watched it happen.

The blogging world is liberating for many software companies because it allows them to (finally!) express their raison d’etre directly, succinctly and forcefully. You can hear it in what Joy wrote today, and I hope there’s lots more to come from my new pals at Enigma.

One of my favorite New Wave tunes was New Toy by Lene Lovich which contained the memorable chorus “I want a new toy, Oh ay oh!” OK, so poetry it ain’t. But we loved dancing to it at Spit on Lansdowne Street.

Anyway, that chorus comes to mind tonight because I have just (finally!) upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3.1 and installed a cool, new widget-capable theme. I love WordPress. Oh ay oh.

Oh, and by the way, I got an iPod touch, too.

“I’ve got to have it all until I’m complete…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding…”

Here, in case you need an 80s flashback, is a link to a YouTube recording of this memorable song.

Whew…what a relief!

After reading this piece about being “Googley” in The Atlantic, I wondered if in fact the nakedly aggressive technology company was a thing of the past. I disagree with Joshua Green’s unsubstantiated assertions that we’re totally transitioning to the cloud and that Google doesn’t intend to do evil, but he does make a point that the tactics Microsoft used to crush everyone else aren’t as apparent as they used to be. What a shame, eh? It was a lot more fun in the 1990′s. I sure as hell learned a lot about how to be crushed when Microsoft destroyed us at Lotus.

I believe that if you are a start-up or small company and you aren’t dripping with testosterone in the marketplace, you lose. You lose because you cannot compete with the 600-pound gorillas in your space who can afford to be the nice guy. You need to get your message out, loud and hard. Otherwise, your secret sauce will go down the drain.

I was searching recently for a hosting company to host a vBulletin forum I am creating for a client, and came across Bluehost, which was mentioned favorably in some forums. 1and1, which I’ve been using for several years is just a disaster. Big, German, slow, rigid, German, insecure, German, ossified, German, I’d grown tired of never getting an answer to any question and being blamed 100% of the time there was a problem.

Come to discover that the CEO of Bluehost, Matt Heaton, has got the exact take-no-prisoners attitude I have been missing lately. Here, on winning, and even better (and more sneeringly) here on Microsoft, Matt has got the exact “stuff” going on in his company to win in a very competitive market.

And, by the way, his company backs up the bluster with good service and pricing.

OK, I am not sure if it’s a scam or not, but I am totally blown away by the Perfect Woman Project.

It certainly looks real…but of course it might be a huge scam of one kind or another. Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating idea. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of "submissions" yet. But all submissions are apparently reviewed by whomever is behind this and posted into categories like "sincere", "mean" and "dirty."

Some posters have tried faux erudite and are posting "poetry." I guess they think the site’s offer to "make a total transformation" into the winner’s "perfect woman" is real enough (or they are horny enough) to try blog-post-romance to win this thing.

Whatever…it’s a lot more clever than anything I’ve seen elsewhere lately, and I’d love to know who’s behind it.

I’m in the middle of an exhausting business trip to France. As anyone who’s been on these slogs knows, the hotel is your haven…a necessary place to be able to kick back and sleep off the long days and stress.

And wouldn’t you think that a Hilton next to the Eiffel Tower in downtown Paris that costs €450 a night would provide that?

Ah…wrong. I’m sitting here baking waiting for the tech to come turn off the heat and while I was hot, I wrote this nastygram to Hilton on its website. Now, I am going to post it here without further comment in hopes that unlike the travel websites, this review will get more search engine exposure from being a stand-alone blog post.

Take my advice: save your company’s money and stay elsewhere.

I am shocked at the condition and facilities at this property.

At €450 a night one would expect to be able to turn the heat on or off in your room. Instead, you are either baking or freezing because the heat cannot be controlled by the guest. A tech has to be called to do it.

There is no gym. The bathroom smells. The furniture is dinged. There is no voicemail for guests. The Wi-Fi charges are outrageous. Reception doesn’t answer the phone. The public areas are worn and shoddy.

Old style energy-saving CFL lamps that warm up — like oil lamps from the 1900s — are used in the room. This place is too cheap to even update to instant-on CFL lamps. The Honors lounge was freezing cold for three days in a row. There are no snacks in it after 9pm but it doesn’t close until 10:30pm. The breakfast in the lounge is poor quality.

I might be traveling to Paris often. I will never, ever stay here again. What a complete rip-off.

Last Friday, I attended a conference sponsored by BU on the legal implications of new media.

What a snore.

Distinguished bloviating attorneys showed how smart they are by (choose one or all):

• Creating long-winded "hypotheticals" about topics from liberty to copyright
• Convincing the audience none of them had ever read a blog, much less written one, or
• Proposing incremental approaches (this largely from an attorney linked to the EFF!) to fixing a completely broken IP legal framework.

Even the keynote speaker, Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, failed to break any ground with his oh-so-predictable this-generation-will-crash-the-barricades rhetoric. I guess I am getting old when I somewhat agree with the supercilious comments at my lunch table that Mr. Moulitsas will mellow with age. (BTW, Kos, I agree with your politics, but not the drama you wrap it up in.)

On the one hand, the fact that the establishment is talking about new media is interesting, but it reminds me of party scenes in TV sitcoms where the young kids do those nasty dances. All the kids in the audience snicker at the lack of authenticity…how tragically unhip the writers were.

Nice try, BU, but next time, just send everyone over to PodCamp Boston.

Remember the Star Trek episode entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles“? Remember how the furry creatures ingratiate themselves with the crew, then multiply so rapidly they nearly overtake the ship?

FiOS TV is like a tribble. With apologies to Dr. McCoy, FiOS TV is born pregnant with problems.

I spent most of 2006 and part of 2007 negotiating with Verizon to bring their cable service to Southborough, MA. I’ve never blogged about their negotiating tactics, which defined mendacity, because I believed strongly that competition would be good for the residents of the Town and if I went public, it would piss them off and we’d end up with no agreement.

Finally, in May of 2007, after a public hearing in which VZ execs promised great service and technology, we agreed on a franchise and VZ began offering FiOS TV in town.

I had high hopes for the system. I had been an early FiOS customer for voice and Internet and both had been rock solid. In particular, the Internet connection was fast and extraordinarily reliable (if a little too nanny-fied; VZ blocks port 80 on dynamic IPs and in the early days of FiOS VZ insisted on pretending it was DSL by requiring routers to support PPPoE to connect).

But TV has been an unrelenting disaster. There are three intersecting areas that combine to make FiOS TV unremittingly infuriating.

First, billing. The bills are really from three separate companies: voice, data and TV. Errors compound each other and take months to resolve. Representatives misrepresent available options and pricing (resulting in VZ insisting that I am their prisoner now for two years when I am certain I only agreed to a one-year package deal).

How’s this for a nightmare? To get back the Internet speed I was promised on the one-year-deal-that-morphed-into-a-two-year-deal generated a $139 disconnection charge. If you can make sense of a VZ bundled bill, please let me know. I think you’re a genius.

Next, technology. During the licensing process, we specifically asked VZ about their technology (see this “issuing authority report” and a memo from me to the committee complaining about their non-answers).

Now, I know why they obfuscated. They have the most fiendishly complex system imaginable. It could have only been designed by a former monopoly. You could only love this system if you think Soviet design and engineering was underrated.

They use several different “optical network interfaces” or ONTs to connect the network to your home. Older ones, like mine, bring 802.3 Ethernet into your home along with coax cable and twisted-pair voice. Newer ones bring only coax into the home along with voice.

In either case, you MUST bridge the cable and Ethernet networks using a bridge called a network interface module because their set-top boxes speak coax for programming and IPTV for on-demand using a protocol called MoCA. And the set-top boxes use plain old IP for the interactive guide.

(Lost yet? Stay tuned for when we talk about service.)

How do they ever get this mess installed? They give their installers a multi-function router containing so many functions I can’t remember them all. But for fun, let’s see what I can remember off the top of my head.

This thing is an Ethernet switch, a router with a DHCP server, a firewall, a wireless access point using 801.11g set to default to insecure WEP connections, a NIM to bridge the coax and Ethernet networks, among other things. It tries to connect to the VZ network as a DHCP client or as a PPPoE client. And, best of all, it has an back-door open port to allow VZ to completely mess it up for you with updates you don’t expect. You cannot use your own equipment, precluding the possibility of putting a VPN or more effective firewall on your network.

Oh, and when you are watching on-demand movies, getting blasted with 20Mbits of IPTV content while you simultaneously surf your 5M/20M Internet connection, you can watch this consumer-grade device almost smoke.

VZ network designers tried to hide their network technology mashup by cramming so many functions into a single box that you almost pity the electrons consumed in this overmatched device.

But the real prize for Rube Goldberg-ness goes to the Motorola HD DVRs and the interactive program guide. VZ had the time and money to send customers beautiful marketing brochures touting the new features of a IPG they downloaded over the summer. But apparently, they didn’t have the time to test the software. The Internet is alive with people suffering problems with this software, and I’ve been bitten worst than most.

That brings me to the last issue: service. No human being can service a system this complex. That means that everyone at VZ involved in servicing this mess is simply guessing. Nobody, apparently, has a clue. Through bitter experience (and some serious reading of the dslreports.com forums), I have a better picture in my head of what’s going on than the poor shlumps who have to deal with customers.

Once VZ upgraded the guide, my DVR starting hanging. I called about this, and was told they’d ship me a replacement. It never arrived. Then I called again. They sent a guy out. He threw rocks at the people who said they’d ship one, replaced mine and left.

Thing still hangs, refuses to record, deletes recordings, etc. etc. Called on a Friday night. Service guy — obviously hacking the problem — factory resets the device remotely. Now, it can’t even tune a channel. Dead HDTV on NFL opening weekend.

Third guy comes Monday to replace the box for a third time and tells me it’s the “levels”. (Old phone guys miss copper with its certainty of volts and ohms.) Box promptly hangs.

Guy calls me today to tell me they think it’s the IMG software (Really?) and a fix will be out “soon”.

On the positive side, VZ techs speak English well and are polite. These guys (and the one hot-looking woman they sent) are not grease-monkeys. They’ve just not been trained. Who could be?

VZ is birthing tribbles at a Malthusian rate.

I was in the new Natick Collection Apple store tonight. (Yes, the “Natick Collection” is just a mall — but to be tragically hip it had to become a “collection”.)

The place was mobbed and we finally got a chance to try the new iPods.  I immediately went for an 80GB iPod Classic to compare it to the 5th gen 80GB model I currently have.

My first impression was that Cover Flow made the thing very slow. Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart was loaded on this unit and while I listened to it, I rapidly pressed the center button. As any iPod owner knows, pressing the center button while you play a song takes you through a loop of additional play functions, like skipping back and forth or changing the rating of the song. I was doing this to see if Apple added any new functions to the loop. They did — the ability to shift in and out of shuffle mode.

But what blew me away is that if you press the button rapidly while the song is playing, the music stutters. I couldn’t believe it…I tried every iPod Classic in the store and they all did it.

Apple is now in its baroque period: constantly guilding the lilly with pretty stuff while the basic technological content slips. The fact they shipped the device like this is proof positive that Apple is cruising on design and brand, and that the technological core of brilliant innovation they used to combine with imagination has begun to wane.

As Porky Pig says,  ”Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks, for the iPod.”

You know how sometimes an institution comes so close to getting it, but then stops short? If it’s the US government, you kinda wanna scream a little, don’t you?

Case in point: the Securities and Exchange Commission. There’s a credit meltdown going on these days, and I was using EDGAR to check up on my broker’s claims of safety in certain bonds. Somehow — I don’t quite remember how — I stumbled across the SEC’s podcast.

Guess what? sec.gov has been at it for a while (the feed has episodes from May, 2005), the content is great and the production vales ain’t bad. You might be thinking, “Hey, they get it.” (Actually, I was thinking, “The SEC gets it better than some of my clients, for whom podcasting is still like motorized vehicles are to Amish folks.)

They got so tantalizingly close: they make a podcast, they put up an RSS feed (I have clients today for whom podcasting means, “Record something and post it on the website”) and they’ve stuck with it. I can even forgive Uncle Sam for burying it somewhere obscure on their website.

But, at the end of the day, they ran outta steam: they failed to list the podcast in iTunes. They’ve guaranteed themselves obscurity.

I’ll bet the iTunes selection staff would’ve been happy to feature it. (I dream of having a podcast featured in the iTunes store!) Putting the sec.gov podcast into every (free!) podcasting directory was a no-brainer.., an easy, logical end-step they clearly could’ve done. After all, they clearly understand most of the rest of what makes a podcast a podcast.

So, no cigar for Uncle SEC. Too bad, I would’ve digged a geek government.

I’ve written here before about the almost religious feelings I have about WordPress (here and here)…and about the amazing community it has spawned. It was a big disappointment for me that I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp last month. As a consolation, PodCamp Boston 2 is coming up and I can’t wait.

One of the most famous voices in the WordPress world is Lorelle VanFossen. Ms. VanFossen is gaining the kind of well-deserved fame that an original in a new medium deserves. Lately, she’s been getting attention from the mainstream press for her stand on content theft (and more recently on nytimes.com, registration required).

Lorelle, I couldn’t agree more. It pisses me off, too. Especially since you are a working author, I completely agree that it’s like stealing food from your mouth.

But, I have to say one thing about Lorelle on WordPress: sometimes I find it incomprehensible. There’s so much content, I am overwhelmed. And for some reason, I can’t grok the organization of this blog. It all seems like one long stream of text. I have trouble telling one post from another. Sometimes, it’s such a sea of links (all admittedly useful) that I lose all context about the actual post. And it may be picky, but since we read English left to right, I think it adds cognitive dissonance to have a left-hand column in the way of the post content.

However, I sure do appreciate the presbyoia-friendly font on Lorelle’s blog.

I expect to be told I’m an idiot and worse. But, at least my idiot mind will make it impossible for me to steal content from Lorelle.

Though I am not a native Bostonian, I have some experience with authentic Boston accents.

My lovely wife can occasionally be unintelligible (“Alex, have you seen the sizzzahs?”). To wile away traffic-jam time, I sit in the car and mimic Tom Finneran. Finneran, a WRKO talk-show radio host, former Massachusetts legislative big-wig and (unsurprisingly) a plea-bargained felon, has an amazingly real Boston accent, one you can hear in every word.

You know that you can hear the real thing, even if you can’t imitate it, when your ears bleed listening to Matt Damon in The Departed. This actor’s attempt is among the worst fake Boston accents I’ve ever heard, and a complete embarrassment to everyone in Chelsea, Malden and Lynn, not to mention Southie itself.

Anyway, when I first heard about CAPTCHAs, I thought it was a killer pun: someone from CMU must have had a Boston background. Maybe so, but really it means something else entirely, and only sounds like it was invented in a drunken episode at the Black Rose.

I manage a bunch of blogs that have been increasingly become the victim of comment spam, usually from China and always complimentary. I now realize that dude in Guangdong who reads my posts mutliple times and always says, “Good post” isn’t really into my content. Naivety mixed with ego had me manually marking these as spam just in case there was a real gem from somewhere in the Middle Kingdom.

The volume has gotten so large that it’s been driving me crazier than Matt Damon’s inability to banish the letter “R” from his spoken English.

Enter reCAPTCHA. An easy way (there’s a simple WordPress plug-in) to stop the comment spam and build a digital library. Can’t beat it. Took five minutes to implement on all the blogs I manage.

Now, it’s off to the Cape and them lobstah rolls.

While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth.

Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T has been the target of repeated customer lawsuits (here and here) and has done just about everything it can do to customers from over-selling Digital One Rate in the late 1990′s to consistently scoring at the bottom of Consumer Reports subscriber surveys.

In fairness, none of the cell companies are very good. But the prize for being the worst for the longest and consistently treating customers like dirt goes to whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-today AT&T.

When Apple, the control freak of the consumer electronics biz, made the rounds of carriers to see which would allow it to control the user experience (this is from Wall Street Journal stories that you need a subscription to read), only AT&T signed up and in return got an exclusive for the iPhone.

I’ll bet you Steve Jobs and Apple are regretting that decision. It’s been a mess, with the ‘Net exploding with horror stories around activation and porting numbers from other carriers. AT&T and Apple are both minimizing the impact publicly, saying that it’s only a few customers.

I know how I’d feel if I’d just made a $2000 commitment to the iPhone — $600 plus 24 months of service at a minimum of $60 — and I was in the “2%” having problems. (Get this, even if you are an AT&T customer you must still activate for two more years. Talk about extending the sentence!)

C’mon…we all know when they’re saying “we had an unexpected surge” or “we’ll clear it up soon” it means it’s outta control. Can we really believe that AT&T didn’t know how many iPhones would be in the stores on June 29th? That they couldn’t have sized their systems to prepare for that number?

The thing is, this must be amazingly painful inside Apple. I feel for them. They tried to keep control of the experience, but they aren’t a cell phone operator…they just really don’t know how to screw customers.

AT&T has sure taught Apple something about control this week. It’s one lesson I hope Apple doesn’t take to heart.

(Photo courtesy of J. Star, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)

OK, so I know that what you blog about is a more-or-less semi-permanent record of you. Plus, I have clients who read this blog. And I might be just a little more over the top than usual with this post, but there’s a real marketing problem with a new product and I think the marketer’s response to that problem is…uh…interesting.

Have you heard of Alli, the new over-the-counter medication for weight loss? It’s a low-dose version of orlistat, a drug that prevents the absorption of fat. That can lead to weight loss for those taking the drug.

The problem with orlistat is that fat that doesn’t get absorbed…it…uh…passes, if you know what I mean. This can potentially create an oily mess.

Imagine being the marketing people for Alli: you want to sell this thing in big, big numbers, but it has this indelicate side effect. And you have to disclose it.

What’s the solution? To them it must have seemed easy: make a helpful recommendation about how to deal with the heartbreak of panty-rear oily streaks.

On www.myalli.com, there’s a “treatment effects” page with this chirpy sounding suggestion for working people on Alli:

Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Now, I have to tell you that any product that pretty much insures users will need to cover up the product’s nasty effects with dark clothes or even keep a supply of adult diapers nearby has a serious marketing problem. And this kind of copy makes it even worse.

Anybody who reads about Alli in the newspaper or looks at the packaging is sure to hear about this side-effect. Why make it worse with a “helpful” suggestion? Isn’t Alli targeted at adults, who presumably know what the implications of this side effect are?

To my ears, this over-the-top effort to be helpful backfires, and does so badly. Far from being useful, it just simply makes the product sound so revolting that I suspect millions will be put off.

This is a simple case of the marketing people just saying too much and overreaching to be “helpful”.

Unlike many members of Red Sox Nation, I don’t wear it on my sleeve.

But my infatuation with the Olde Town Team goes back to my days as a BU student living in Kenmore Square, watching the ’75 World Series on TV with the sound turned down and the windows open in Myles Standish where we could hear the crowd a second or two before we saw the play on TV. With my eyes open, I can still see the ’86 series running away through Bill Buckner’s legs.

After college, I put up with the detritus of the Nation when I lived on Park Drive in the days before Fenway Park prohibited beer sales after the 7th inning. Lemme tell ya, if you can still love the Red Sox after what I put up with from the Nation — from vomit on my door step and on my car to guys from Southie terrorizing my girlfriend — you’ve got a lifetime, paid-up membership in the Nation.

So, there’s no need to explain how I felt in 2004.

But I couldn’t understand it…I just couldn’t grok it. C’mon, we all know the curse couldn’t just disappear like that. And what about 2007? As I write this, the Red Sox are 11 and a half ahead of the Orioles and are playing .700 baseball. The Yankees are in a last place tie in the AL East. Something had to have happend to the curse. It had to be lying in wait for what I feared would be a reappearance that would damn the team for all eternity.

But I couldn’t explain why the curse was dormant until today, when I read in the Wall Street Journal that John Henry’s investment business is on the rocks. Some of his investment funds are down as much as 38%. Merrill Lynch just pulled $600M from his firm.

I’ve always liked John Henry for what he’s done for the team. But I had no idea how selfless he really was: he’s absorbed the curse for all of us. He’s going to be penniless soon…well, not completely broke…courtesy of the curse, which has apparently left the team and infected the owner.

Hey, John! Thanks 600 million times over! BTW, if I were you, I’d get outta the investment biz right away. That curse is the real thing. 87 years is a long, long time to under perform the market. Still, the quicker you go broke, the faster Red Sox Nation will be celebrating the Red Sox replacing the Yankees as the new dynasty in the AL East.

If the title doesn’t make it clear that I’m upset, let me start by saying that an article I’ve just read on nytimes.com (registration required) has me neck-vein-throbbing apoplectic. (It’s my blog, and I’ll use 50¢ words if I want to, 50¢ words if I want to.)

In short, I don’t understand how the marketing people responsible for shaping the heads of psychiatrists to prescribe off-label uses of dangerous, highly-toxic drugs like Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify and Geodon for adolescents can freakin’ sleep at night.

Hey, I am a marketing guy, and I try everyday to get people to try to use the products I market in novel ways.

But nothing I market turns adolescents’ muscles into grotesque knots. What I market has been tested, in contrast to these drugs, none of which have
been tested on adolescents. And nothing I market is based on pure voodoo, camouflaged by 400 years of Western intellectual thought that has made psychiatry a “science” because we’re just too damn civilized to admit that the guy in the white coat is just the local shaman.

On the face of it, a doctor who prescribes an off-label use for a dangerous drug to kids is simply guessing. Hedge it anyway you want, but that’s what it is…a freakin’ guess. Sure, they can veneer it with plenty of pseudo-scientific talk, but the bottom line is they’re playing “20 questions” with your kids’ lives.

Why do they do it? It’s because the village diviners have no value unless they medicate (since they haven’t got a clue of what else to do). They do it because parents demand it (it makes them feel like they’re accomplishing something in the treatment of their children). They do it because the FDA lets them do it. (Consumer Reports says in its June 2007 issue that something like 21% of all drugs are prescribed for off-label uses.)

But mostly, they do it because the marketers at the pharmas tell them to.

Check out this quote from the article. This guy thinks it’s his “science” that convinces him to give kids prescription stimulants related to amphetamines. But we know it’s J&J’s marketing dollars, sent to him by marketing managers whose marketing logic is Mengele-esque:

Ten years ago, Dr. Realmuto [a University of Minnesota psychiatrist] helped conduct a study of Concerta, an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug marketed by Johnson & Johnson, which also makes Risperdal. When Concerta was approved, the company hired him to lecture about it.

He said he gives marketing lectures for several reasons.

“To the extent that a drug is useful, I want to be seen as a leader in my specialty and that I was involved in a scientific study,” he said.

The money is nice, too, he said. Dr. Realmuto’s university salary is $196,310.

“Academics don’t get paid very much,” he said. “If I was an entertainer, I think I would certainly do a lot better.”

Folks, save your kids from these very dangerous marketing people. Remember that your doctor has been bought and paid for. Snake-oil kills.

Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes.

What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google.

You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the sole purpose of increasing revenue for Google. You will take whatever Google believes is your rightful SEO position and you will never really know how it was determined (after all, they’ve read Kafka, too).

Finally, and most importantly, you will advertise like it was a marathon until you (or your budget) drops dead from exhaustion.

George said it best:

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxman
Yeah, I’m the taxman

So there, I’ve crammed it all into one more-or-less coherent rant about Google. What’d you think?

To the surprising large number of people who’ve emailed, called, IM’ed and otherwise let me know that you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I offer as a short interlude this post with its “a picture tells a 1000 words” explanation.”

This is like the overly-long intermissions in 1960′s film musicals like My Fair Lady and West Side Story. Go get some popcorn, take a constitutional and I’ll be back shortly, brimming with fire about something or other.

Just when you think you’ve outgrown all sense of fashion, peer pressure and have resigned yourself to your own middle-aged individuality, along comes a jolting reminder than your cohort’s tastes may change, but the pressure to conform doesn’t.

I was scanning a newsletter for a client and ran across this amazing story: BMW owners love HDTV’s. Then I downloaded the entire report and discovered that I am doing precisely what I am being told to do by the marketing machines of several technology and automotive companies.

I took comfort in that. At least if I am not original, I am cooperative.

A cold that I brought back from Europe resulted this week in a cough nasty enough to remind me of the incessant hacking, phlegm-ing and general mucous-ness of a smoker I once had the misfortune to sit across from. Yech.

But in the “better living through chemistry” department: my doctor gave me a prescription to retard the near disgorging of my lungs through my throat: a codeine-laced “cough syrup.” Man, when you pick up this stuff at the pharmacy, they look at you like you’re some time-machined refugee from an 18^th century opium den. I couldn’t figure out why…until I took one tiny little teaspoon full.

Maybe I am just easily intoxicated. But this stuff not only stopped my urge to cough – it took me off the planet. To a planet where nobody coughs…nobody speaks…and nobody can hear the colors in your mind.

People who know me know I’m not a big drinker…and drugs never appealed to me. So maybe it’s just low tolerance, but as soon as I finish this post (delayed for hours by hacking my brains out)…there’s a spoonful calling me.

Every now and then, even the best of us does really stupid stuff. Thursday, February 1 was my day.

I was headed home from Paris after a good set of meetings…all I had to do was get to the airport on time.

We were booked on Air France 332, leaving CDG at 1:15pm. The instructions said the check-in deadline was 12:15pm. I’ve even got proof. Here’s a snippet from the itinerary:

1:15 PM Paris, Charles de Gaulle (CDG) – France – Terminal 2E
Deadline for check-in : 12:15 PM
3:00 PM Boston, Logan Intl (BOS) MA – Usa

So, when does stuff run on time in France? Apparently only when the taxi you ordered for 10am shows up at 11:05am when you have to get from the Eiffel Tower to CDG in 70 minutes. We saw the taxi arrive just as we were running to the Metro to take the train.

It took us exactly 73 minutes…we arrived breathless at the gate at 12:18pm and were denied boarding. Worse, we were told that the real deadline was 11am…that the reservation system was wrong. Who knew?

That 3 minute miss cost me another 24 hours in Paris…and the searing crticism of my client who pronounced the whole episode “bush league.”

Ouch. Frickin’ mega OUCH.

I pride myself on being a wizened world-traveler. Though this was the first time I’ve missed a plane in over 20 years, it still makes you feel stupid.

The next day the check-in agents appeared to have pity on us. The plane wasn’t full and they put us upstairs (AF has economy-class seats upstairs on its 747-400s. That quiet, spacious upper deck is usually business class on other airlines.) I had a whole row to myself…and 7 hours 45 minutes of time to consider how expensive three minutes can be.

If you even lightly press the “talk technology” button on Alex, you are more than likely going to get a lot of gushing from me about WordPress.

Since I first found WordPress 2.0 in the early summer, I’ve been amazed at what I, last a developer 15 years ago, could do with this industrial-strength, multi-user content management and publishing system.

It’s so astonishingly simple in concept…so amazingly easy to implement that I’ve had great success in getting people to use it. And, as a further testament to its ease of use, I’ve even seen what can charitably be described as low- to no-talent geeks convince themselves they’re the next Torvalds because of the instant feeling of success one gets using WordPress.

But now, even when I thought it couldn’t get any better, along comes WordPress 2.1. Following the instructions for upgrading took about an hour (much of that spent backing up files). After that, everything worked perfectly.

This is my first post in WordPress 2.1 and I’ve already fallen in love even though I’ve only been using it for about 10 minutes.

When you’ve been around software as long as I have there are a couple of ways that you can tell right away when something “has it.” In WordPress 2.1, those indications are all over the product. From the fact that it upgrades more easily than any complex publishing system has a right to, to the small stuff like a “last saved” indicator in the editor and subtle yet massive improvements in the UI that don’t make the user re-learn anything, WordPress 2.1 might be the most impressive and accessible achievement the open-source community has created.

Matt and the team: congratulations, and thank you very much.

Oooooh, Mama! There’s some serious fur flying in the blogosphere.

You all know I am a car junkie. And you all know I am a blog junkie. I satisfy both cravings with a healthy dose of car blogs and forums, with my favorite being The Truth About Cars.

This blog has it all: killer writing, a sense of humor and the balls to tell it like it is. In contrast to the rest of the pablum I consume about cars, these guys (apparently) could care less what the traditional car press thinks of them. These guys are nobody’s sycophants.

OTOH, I’ve admired GM for its early adoption of the blogosphere, if not for its pitiful products. For a company that just doesn’t get it on the product or marketing side, I’ve thought they’ve shown at least passing glimmers of “getting it” on their Fastlane blog.

GM had a podcast that, for a while, was cute. It featured this PR woman with the most nasal Midwestern twang I’ve ever heard who fawned over the GM execs she was able to get on the phone. When they got Corvette engineers to talk into their low-production-value podcasts (these podcasts are like GM interiors), you understood the meaning of unctuousness. But it was early corporate grokking of the blogosphere for 2005…and it was way inventive for GM.

Once, Lutz himself gave what I still think is a compelling description (about 2/3 of the way into this podcast) of why the blogosphere required authenticity and corporate involvement. I agree that the blogosphere is way to even the tables, even when across the table from you is Chubba Cheddar-cheese who’s never seen a press junket he didn’t like.

Still, GM management is responsible for destroying an American industrial icon through inexplicable and inexpressible hubris. And I’ve wondered why Lutz has never been culpable for this. He’s been there long enough. He’s delivered his own Aztek (or two).

But now…but now…it’s gotten really hot in the kitchen. The Truth About Cars is personally blasting Lutz, in its long-running (and sadly poignant) GM Death Watch over Lutz’s inchoate rant about CAFE.

If you like cars, you gotta read both posts, along with all the comments. If you don’t like cars, you still gotta read the posts and comments.

It’s all there: all the tragedy of GM’s arrogance, the unmasking of Lutz as just-another-cog-in-the-machine-of-GM-destruction, the astonishing balls of TTAC to write and post what it did, the car community going nutz over these posts.

I’m never going to need to watch another female mud-wrestling contest as long as these beeatches keep this up.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been a Microsoft fan. I’ve considered their products derivative and their business practices despicable. Office was a response to Lotus SmartSuite and Outlook has always been stuck at Notes Release 3 in terms of user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft to this day is still trying to kill what remains of the Notes/Domino customer base despite the fact that the remaining base is simply IBM customers who will never ever convert to Exchange.

But, I am completely and totally blown away by the blogging support in Microsoft Word 2007. I’m writing this post in Word 2007…and the support for my blog – from uploading graphics to category support – is superior. Finally…finally…they’ve nailed something inventive. Now, you can comfortably write and edit posts in Word, the de facto standard word processor.

This ain’t just pigs flying for me…it’s freakin’ flying frogs. (If you’ve never had the opportunity to make a kid giggle while reading Tuesday by David Wiesner go out right now buy the book and find a three to five year old to read it to. )

A bit of background: I’ve been worried about Office 2007 for quite some time. I’m an expert user of Office and the idea of the ribbon bothers me. For example, I actually rely on customized toolbars. Except for Outlook 2007, that capability has been removed in Office 2007. Also, there’s a lot of eye candy in Office 2007. I’m no neo-Luddite, but I actually worried about losing my expertise or, worse, having to essentially re-learn all the tricks I rely on every day. From Shift-F7 in Word to open the thesaurus to Ctrl-1 in Excel to format a cell, I simply didn’t want to have to change.

So, just to see how bad it would be (after all, if Microsoft says you want to use their new suite, it’s less an invitation than a command. Eventually, you pretty much have to do as you’re told when it comes to what Microsoft wants from you.), I set up a WinXP virtual machine and downloaded the 60-day trial of Office 2007 Professional.

And though I expected to be truly pissed off at the ribbon, the loss of desktop real estate and what I suspected would be poor performance, I am actually blown away. For me, blogging support in Word means that my clients as well as I can write more “comfortably” than ever. RSS support in Outlook is my other I’ve-been-using-it-for-two-hours new feature.

Bottom line: Microsoft often gets criticism for not offering compelling features for upgrades of Office. That’s why I have a client still on Office 97. But this time, Microsoft is getting my (ouch!) $300 for a shiny new copy of Office 2007.

Pretty picture, ain't it?

Actually, it's what's happening to this blog, despite my good intentions. What we rail about over on the corporate blog and in our podcast — the orphaned blog — is beginning to happen here.

I've got a million excuses, some of them pretty darn good. I'm blogging like a maniac for clients, AgencyNext's blog is really getting traction and needs attention, my life is busy and full.

But it's bull. Like the kid above who needs to stop making excuses for all the candy, if I wanted to make this blog bigger, I would and I could.

I'm sad.

Lotus Notes — which played a huge role in my career — has been vanquished more or less completely by Microsoft (though they won't stop attacking until the carcass has dessicated into dust). And its (formerly) thought-provoking leadership has apparently come down with an early case of Alzheimer's, is lost and looks like those poor bastards sleeping on the grates in Copley Square next to the Boston Public Library.

What's set me off? This completely trite, pedestrian, and useless bromide of "etiquette" when using instant messaging. Was this supposed to be some kind of post-Foley joke? You know, here's all the stuff he should have done, like remembering to "introduce yourself." Or remembering to "act professionally."

C'mon, this stuff isn't fit for the unsold ad space in an in-flight magazine on Outer Zambian Airways. Or maybe the execs at IBM/Lotus are casting their eyes enviously on the Boston Globe's Sunday business etiquette column. You know…"Mr. Notes says flossing your teeth while emailing is tres rude."

What happened? Why have they given up even the appearance of having one competitive brain cell rubbing against the other?

It's simple: all the good minds have moved on. That's what's left…manners lessons from IBM execs for the collaboration challenged.

I remember reciting the Humpty-Dumpty rhyme for my kids. I know a lot of revisionist people think these nursery rhymes have a violent streak to them. But in this case, it's a pretty good message: break it, and you can't put it back together again.

I wonder if there's an equivalent message for non-English speaking kids. Maybe so…maybe not. But I would assume that whatever their background, people get the message somewhere along the way: at some point, you just can't say, "ooppsss…sorry about that" and pretend it never happened.

What's this got to do with anything? Simple…putting the eggshell pieces together only reminds people that you broke the egg.

If you make a promise — in business or in life — then renege on it, it doesn't matter what you do to try and make it up after the fact. The egg is done gone and broke.

I’m in love…with WordPress.

Since late July, I’ve been using this amazing system to produce blogs. What blows me away is that this system has all the features of industrial-strength commercial software.

Having been in the software biz since the 70s, I never thought I’d ever be able to say that about an open-source, GPL-licensed product. And trust me, WordPress is a real product in every sense of the word as I’ve heard it used in my software experience.

What’s so astonishing to me is that no matter what task I’ve needed it to do in the last 90 days, there’s been either a way to do it in the base product or a plug-in that did it and which we could install and use in minutes.

The plug-in that has just totally blown me away this week is Podpress. This is a simply astonish piece of functionality that turns WordPress into the most amazing podcast feed imaginable. Total time to install and customize: about 30 minutes.

Today, with zero training in PHP (and very little HTML background to boot), I was able to customize a template in WordPress. Though the finer points of CSS and browser incompatibility continue to drive me wild with frustration, for a curious hobbyist, there’s nothing else like it on the Internet. With WordPress and a run-of-the-mill ISP hosting account (1and1 has a great one for $3/month), you can achieve a level of muti-user content management and publishing unheard of for hundreds of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.

I style myself as a geek snob, knowing what’s good and what ain’t in tech. I haven’t got the words to describe how amazing WordPress is. 

Dear Mr. or Ms. Someone-who-knows-better,

I owe you an apology. I didn't approve your comment of August 27th in reply to my post of July 21 until today because it ended up in the spam bucket (imagine that!) and I didn't see it until today. Sorry about that.

It's my policy to allow all comments unless they are clearly spam or in poor taste. I don't want you to think that I deliberately censored your freedom of expression, even when you're using that freedom to trash me from behind the cover of a fake email address and spoofed Internet address.

I don't consider your rant in poor taste…honestly. I think you have some unresolved issues, but you have the right to say whatever you like about me. Even on my blog, on my nickel. It's clear we have met, or worked together, or maybe even shared a meal or two. Who knows? Who cares?

What's clear, though, is that you took personally something I said on July 21 …a full month later. How could that be? What makes you think it's addressed to you or anyone in particular? Are we cutting a little too close to the bone somehow? Did you recognize something in you that made you see red? Are you so sure it's about you?

Being just a little self-centered there, don't you think? I wouldn't want this to veer off into into something really pathological. So, calm down…we're all good, you and me (whoever you are).

Oh, by the way, if you have anything else you'd like to say, go ahead…this blog is open…I'll just spend more time looking in the trash folder. Promise.

Today, I learned a lot about complacency . Not mine (though I'll bet I'm guilty more than just occasionally). This time, it's the complacency of someone else, which makes it a lot easier to see.

In the business world, that "I've got it covered, don't worry" attitude sometimes goes along with being in an established company. You think you can squash the "bugs", the little guys…just flit them away simply because you are who you are, or because you work in the firm you do or because you have some money in the bank.

That's an underestimation organizations and individuals can live to regret. And, believe me, the penalty for being smug is usually directly proportional to the level of complacency. The more you are sure you don't have a problem, the more likely you are to be stunned.

I found this astonishing podcast the other day, and I have to tell you, it's may be the best podcast I've heard in a long time. Right, you say….a podcast on English grammar?

I run three miles every morning. Because I am not a natural athlete and at 6am my body is…shall we say…reluctant, my iPod is my motivator to do something I really don't like. I need the aural stimulation. Most days, it's Led Zeppelin or equivalent that does the trick.

So, how could a podcast about English grammar be a must-listen at dawn? Simple: it's fascinating. I write (a lot) and Grammar Girl gives me what I want to know about doing it better. She sounds young, but reminds me of Mrs. Kendall, my 5th grade English teacher (would you believe I was in 5th grade in 1965? Some readers of this blog believe that's too old to be useful).

That old lady (she was ancient in 1965) drilled us hard. And I know I wasn't the only kid to come out of that class in Jacksonville, Fla. able to make a subject and verb agree in number.

And, OK, I'll admit it: I find the odd rules and irregularities of English grammar as intricate and pleasurable as fans do who live in online virtual environments and who spend years in role-playing games. I love knowing what's correct, what isn't and how to string a sentence together. And Grammar Girl is helping me do it better.

There are very, very few podcasts like that. (My other must-listen is, of course, Security Now!.)

So, even though the guys in the office (that would be you, Sterling and Dave) were merciless and full of ridicule, I'm a big fan of Grammar Girl. You should be, too.

I take a lot of guff from people about my obsession with cars. In particular, I am currently getting no pity — none – for lusting after a new car. Not this one (it's a coupe)…but the one rumored to follow later in '07: a 335i sedan. 

I gotta have one in this color.

Why? It's not the twin-turbocharged 300hp engine. Nope, don't care about about the paddle shifters (though it does mean that I can even buy the car because we have to have an automatic).

Nah, what I want, what's gonna cost me — big time — are the real time traffic reports in the navigation system. Got a navi on my current 330i. But like a real geek, I gotta buy a whole new car just to get a software upgrade.

Isn't there something I can take to control this? 

Sometimes the synchronicity of it all blows me away.

First, I was really excited to discover a completely new, wonderful word: susurrus, which means "a whispering or rustling sound". I saw it it, in of all places, in an editorial today in the Wall Street Journal decrying the public whipping Sir Paul McCartney and his wife are giving each other in their big-time divorce.

That got me to thinking about how corrosive divorce is, as several people and families close to me are dealing with the catastrophe of divorce right now, today. 

Then, I got to thinking about how sururrations of lies, deceit and misdirection were evident early on in a recent personal experience. But you can't hear susurrus when you're inside busting your butt and the waves of mendacity are rolling in on the tide.

Yeah, I know that's a long-winded, OED-over-maxed way of saying, "you can't hear a leaf falling in the forest when you're in downtown traffic." But I am certain some of you reading this know exactly what I mean and to whom it's directed.

And then I was looking for a graphic about gossip (which is usually susurrated). Came across this beauty on Wikipedia which was perfect in its early Soviet anger and matched the Russian theme of another blog post I wrote today over on www.agencynext.com.

It's all too synchronous. 

Good question, isn't it? This is the view from the place we rented for a family vacation this week on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

The weather has been a 10. The water is cold. (This is freakin' New England, for sure.)

And a lot happened. I'm not sure how to sum it all up. 

Daddy's Junkie Music ripped off my kid. She worked all summer to buy a used keyboard from them. They sold it to her with a power supply that would've fried the keyboard. We discovered it and fixed it with a trip to Radio Shack. (Doesn't it depress you when you shop in a rural mall on vacation?)

Growing old: my kid also worked on college essays. This might be the last (or next to last) family vacation.

My younger kid alternated between math drills, swimming (she's officially categorized as a "flying fish" after her earlier two weeks on the Lake at summer camp) and making sure we ate a lot of ice cream.

She also drove a motorized vehicle for the first time at a go-kart place. Crashing three times pissed off the staff, but, hey, it was a safe place to give a 10 year old the controls.

My wife spent the week looking ravishing in the summer sun and spending long hours with me on the deck you see above reading. (I finally got through The DaVinci Code. What bullshit. What pandering. The sacred feminine? C'mon, this was a book that mixed bad religion and homeopathic doses of sex for titillation.)

Finally, tonight as the sun set in downtown Wolfeboro and we sat on the dock eating dinner in the glorious late summer, I realized the difference between Disney and the real world.

At Disney, everything conspires to make the predictable happen. In the real world, when everything is absolutely, unimpeachablly perfect, nothing could conspire to make it so. It simply happens. You're there, you're in the moment, and you gotta make sure you see it when it happens.

I've been cartharisizing here lately about my own apparent naivete.

But today, I want to rant about something else: those who profess integrity but define it by their own standards. You know, the ones who think nothing of copping a little free music from the 'Net or making promises they have no intention of keeping.

They're hard to read at first because they really don't think they've done anything wrong. Only later, when they're exposed do you experience the full force of the contradiction: they're mendacious by most objective measures, in fact by any measure, except their own. 

But the reality is that when you're an lying asshole, you're simply a lying asshole. Protest all you want, get all the sycophants who need you to help nestle you in a cloud, but you're still a lying asshole.

Damn! I feel better.

So, I recently asked someone what my good qualities were, and he said loyalty was one of them.

Did believing that I was loyal make any difference in this relationship? Apparently not, as I think today's image aptly describes what happened.

It's gotten me to thinking that loyalty (apart from that you express to your family and bonded friends) is sorely misplaced in the larger world.

Yeah, yeah. I know I am freakin' naive.

If you are interested in marketing for technology companies, head on over to my colleague Sterling Hager's latest observations on what's real in the world of making your product famous. 

Sure, Mel. Send us roses, crank up the defensive PR and get a lot of sympathy for your "struggle" with alcoholism.

But we all know that the desperation to blame your disease is only a cover for the reality that you're a closet bigot.

Funny thing about alcohol: with vino comes veritas.

Please do get well. Treat the disease; then maybe you can attack that bigotry as a sober guy. Meanwhile, spare us the phony contrition.

Last Monday, my partner and I had to visit a client in NYC.

Can't take the shuttle; the tunnel will kill you before you get to the airport.

So, for the first time ever, I decided to take the Acela from Route 128 to Penn Station in NYC because Penn Station is just five minutes' walk from the clients' office.

So, what does one do today when you book tickets? You book online, right? And while you're booking the tickets, when you come to the "enter promotional code" entry, you open a new window and search Google for "amtrak and discount."

It takes about five seconds to find the best discount. Here I found a code for 25% off. Bam! In goes the code and off come the bucks. Round trip BOS-NYC for about $125. Can't beat it. I'm happy, and thinking that if the train is nice, this might be the new thing.

But — and this is what I just can't believe — when I got to the station to pick up the tickets, the clerk balked, saying "there's been some abuse of H570." (He gave me the tickets anyway.)

Now, Amtrak really has to be tone deaf to think that if it sends its frequent prisoners a discount coupon it isn't going to be widely discussed by the inmates. And that those forums will get crawled. And that I would find it in a heartbeat.

Where did Amtrak think the emails would go?

Worse, their idiot marketers not only tried to put the genie back in the bottle, they asked their poor clerks to do it for them.  What is the clerk going to do, except piss off customers who have already bought and paid for discounted tickets?

You end up getting on the train all bent out of shape after having been confronted by the clerk, who really could care less but who has been ordered to police something I suspect they really don't understand.

After all this, the ride wasn't too bad (except for the conductor wearing an Amtrak uniform who when asked a question said, "I don't know. Ask Amtrak. I just punch the tickets."). But it sure doesn't make me want to ride the train again. I'm seeing H570 in my nightmares now. 

Sorry, Shakespeare. But this phrase from Hamlet comes to mind as I've been reflecting on the nature of false modesty.

Actually, I've learned quite a lot about this particular affliction from up close, personal contact with it. And what I've finally realized (maybe a little late) is that someone that "doth protest too much" is really masking a naked, ugly, overwhelming arrogance.

False modesty is an especially effective mask for arrogance. In cultures where arrogance is both endemic and therefore taboo, false modesty is the cover up. With false modesty, a guilt-ridden society can appear reformed while endorsing culturally impermissible arrogance.

False modesty is the sedative for arrogance's cutting blade. False modesty trades on apparent sincerity, lulling victims into an early trust. Once sedated, the cutting can begin. Then, the sudden personality bait-and-switch reveals penetrating aggression. Like a snake that paralyzes the prey before eating it, false modesty transfixes people.

The unmasked lie only makes the aggression worse. You end up recoiling at two things. The lie of false modesty itself. And worse, you are repulsed with embarrassment at the arrogance laid bare.

Now, when I hear people deny expertise they clearly want, my guard will be up. Way up.

I was reading Scoble's post about Ford's attempts to use the blogosphere to help them overcome the fact that their cars just plain stink.

So, OK, it's all right with me if Scoble decides to hawk Ford PR's blog, and it's professionally-produced-to-look-verite documentary (which is too slick to be real, too manipulative to be credible and which defines sycophant, as all the "heavy discussion" in the room revolves around the senior exec).

But what's not OK is how Ford responds to the New York Times lambasting they took last weekend: 

"We here at FordBoldMoves.com understand exactly what social media is and how important the 'social' part of that phrase will be going forward."

You know, I love Led Zeppelin, and I do a mean air guitar on "Whole Lotta Love." But it doesn't make a single note come out of thin air.

And Ford — so dumb as to cancel the only cars they have high loyalty with, the somnolent Town Car — can wave its arms all it wants about understanding online communities, but they'll never, ever get it.

I've worked in these giant corporations. And they do sit around their desks trying to be hip, and cool, and blog-y. But they never really want to be other than what they were before: successful on their own terms. Understanding social media means not being corporate. It means having something really interesting to say. It means being able to "take it." Does anyone really believe Ford can take it? If so, why is their blog registration only?

IBM tried this with OS/2. First they had the "OS/2 Fiesta Bowl" in which college football players got tackled on OS/2 logos painted on the field. Then they tried "OS/2 Ambassadors" which was the early 1990's version of community.

IBM ultimately gave up on the attempt to grasp community and on a product nobody wanted. Ford will do the same thing when the coolsters on their marketing staff have had their fill of trying to follow the directions from the 64-pound box of Madison Ave. brand "Whipped Internet Community Mix."

Mr. Fields: build cars people want, build them well. Let your engineers talk, not your PR people who so very much want to make you feel good about Ford (and who, apparently, are succeeding despite the real downward spiral your company is in).

Stop trying pretending to know something about community; it only makes you look even more pitiful, like Grandma in a mini-skirt and knee-high boots.

Some people go to the beach on hot Saturdays in July. They pack the family in the minivan, load up on sunscreen and fight for a parking spot at Signing Beach or Horseneck Beach. Some give up and spend the day in Revere standing in line at Kelly's for too much roast beef and an order of fries large enough to add five pounds to people who normally have a tapeworm in their stomachs.

Not me. I prefer to spend my day Autocrossing with the Boston Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. 

In case you aren't familiar with AutoX, it's a form of racing in which you navigate a devilish course of parking cones as fast as you can. It's your car — and your driving skills — against the clock. Believe me, it's not as easy as you might think.

What I love about it is that it allows you safely test the limits of your skill. All you can hit is a cone. Better still, you don't have to be hard core about it, though many people are. The hard core types range from those with an extra set of racing wheels and tires to people who trailer in non-street-legal AutoX cars.

Me? I just add air to my tires, make sure the lug nuts are tight and drive my daily driver — yeah, that one with the automatic transmission — right onto the course. Nobody cares. This is competitive within classes, but very friendly.

So, I've done this before with an S2000. But this is the first time I've AutoX'ed my E90.

More significantly, it was the first time my 17-year-old daughter had ever been to an AutoX.

And not only was it fun, but it illustrated a point to her that I could have never made as clear in words or other example: people who drive like fools on the street are, in fact, fools.

AutoX is about speed, of course, but it's more about control of speed. My daughter sat in the car during my runs and came away knowing two important things. First, there's never a chance, never ever, to drive like you do in an AutoX on public roads. Second, the skills you learn in AutoX are directly transferable to the street: you lean to quickly yield, avoid or detour around the pre-pubescent Massholes on the roads in their Mustangs and Camaros who obviously have a right foot but nothing connected to it.

I think it's pretty darn cool that even with the explosion of the blogosphere a new blog, even one put up primarily for venting, can get some attention.

But, it's been two days since my last post, and I am now able to say why. I was in the hospital for a test. All's well, fortunately, but the "preparation" for this test is worse than the test itself. Sunday night I amused myself by setting up this blog. But Monday and Tuesday, I just felt too sick to do anything with it.

In fact, it wasn't until this afternoon (Wednesday), that I felt like my former self. And that feeling – of being back-  in and of itself made my day. My wife, my kids, even the wackos at Honda who won't fix a clear warranty issue were beautiful to me today. So, happiness really is a warm johnnie.

But…back to the main theme: how I left the bits uptown. (C'mon, surely some of you get it by now…it's as clear as White)
When you get to this point (does it have a name? Middle age? Wisdom? Reversion to adolescence?) you can feel stuck. Stuck big time. Family, bills, obligations…choices you made inadvertently decades ago that seemed so innocuous are now opening that johnnie to the ice cold wind of failure.

In short, you tend to keep doing what you were no matter what. Even if the world is telling you that you suck at it. "It's all I know." "It's part of me."

Since this is a G-rated blog, all I can say is "hooey."

I've already begun a new (really, ancillary) career. This time, it's something that I will be integral to. And that's the most important thing: if you aren't integral, you're disposable.And you can be disposed of by any other integral because, simply, you aren't.

I'm not whining about job security. Instead, in the kind of work I do — used to do — commitment wasn't enough. You have to cater to the whims and egos of integrals. Bottom line, I really suck at that.
Mea culpa.

OK, am I showing red, pouting lips in my first post because I really, really want people to read my blog?

Uh, no. Not quite.

It’s because you make the “whew” sound (a bilabial fricative) when you are about to jump off a cliff… or you are about to do what I’ve done: change careers late.

Very late.

After years and years of being a geek, after which I decided it was a young person’s game followed by years and years of being a tech marketing guy, I’ve decided that my true love is PR.

So, I’ve joined up with Sterling Hager (you know who he is) and after a summer vacation, we are going to make Think-Brain scream-loud for clients who want what I am calling “Agency Next.”

There will be more about Agency Next soon. But right now, the simple declaration of doing this — even though there’s nobody reading — has me thinking about the difference between American culture and some Asian, especially Chinese cultures.

In China, and especially in business there, age equals wisdom. In the US, age equals expense. In the former, older people like me are presumed to have much more to offer in business. Here, in many tech startups, guys like me as seen as pure expense.

So, the scary thing — the thing I that makes me say “whew” all the time as I contemplate this exciting new adventure — is will clients understand the value? Or, are they so overcompensating with puny, cryptic little Google ads that they can’t grasp the value of steady, experienced hands managing their presence in the world?

We’ll soon see.